ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sustain.
Sec. Sustainable Supply Chain Management
This article is part of the Research TopicMathematical Optimization for Decision Support Systems: Practices and Strategies for Sustainable Supply Chain ManagementView all 4 articles
Multi-Objective Optimization Framework for Sustainable Olive Oil Supply Chains: Integrating Environmental Compliance with Economic Performance
Provisionally accepted
- 1Universite de Sousse, Sousse, Tunisia
- 2King Faisal University, Al-Ahsa, Saudi Arabia
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Mediterranean olive oil production faces a critical sustainability challenge: managing olive mill wastewater (OMW), a highly polluting byproduct (0.8–1.2 m³/ton) threatening environmental compliance and supply chain viability. This study develops an integrated multi-objective Mixed-Integer Linear Programming framework that jointly optimizes harvest scheduling, processing allocation, and OMW management, treating environmental constraints as hard optimization limits rather than soft penalties. The ε-constraint method generates Pareto frontiers revealing explicit trade-offs between environmental performance, oil quality, and economic profit, implemented in Python 3.9+ with Gurobi optimizer. Validation through a Tunisian case study (18 groves, 4 teams, 3 mills, 14-day horizon) demonstrates both analytical power and infrastructure challenges. While operational optimization achieves 14.6% CO2 emission reduction and maintains regulatory compliance, OMW valorization remains at 12.8%—far below 80% policy targets—revealing fundamental infrastructure-regulation disconnect. Multi-objective analysis shows balanced solutions achieve 80–85% of maximum performance across all dimensions, while single-objective approaches sacrifice 35–65% in non-prioritized objectives. Sensitivity analysis quantifies infrastructure investment pathways: doubling valorization capacity increases recovery to 23.6% with 30.8% profit improvement, while distributed networks could reach 60–70% valorization necessary for regulatory compliance. The framework demonstrates that environmental constraints, when architecturally embedded, define opportunity spaces for competitive advantage rather than performance limitations, providing actionable guidance for phased regulatory implementation with 3–4 season infrastructure payback periods.
Keywords: multi-objective optimization, Sustainable supply chains, Circular economy, Decision support systems, Environmentalcompliance, Agricultural logistics, Waste valorization, Mediterranean agriculture
Received: 23 Sep 2025; Accepted: 02 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Argoubi and MILI. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Khaled MILI
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