Identification of Critical Objects of Supply Chains to Reduce the Level of Strategic Environmental Risks

Abstract

Advanced directions of supply chain development are based on the principles of environmental responsibility, which attract attention of researchers, participants and users of supply chains towards the issues of nature protection, defense of ecological systems and organization of environment-protection measures for sustainable development. This paper considers a problem of determining the most important sources of strategic environmental risks in supply chains. Optimal use and consumption of natural resources can reduce economic losses and damage caused to the environment, reduce the amount of waste and decrease the need for resources for industrial use. Solving strategic environment-oriented tasks in supply chain management (including the development of mathematical and economic-mathematical models) taking into account the environmental aspects of material flow distribution in supply chains, allows to ensure their ecologically balanced functioning. We propose a procedure that reduces the dimensionality of the supply chain model without losing significant information about strategic environmental risks and associated losses. As a measure of knowledge about the most important sources of risks in the supply chain, we propose to use the information entropy. To solve the problem of identifying the most important sources of strategic environmental risks in supply chains, an approach is developed based on the use of information entropy as a measure of knowledge about negative deviations of strategic environmental indicators. As a result, a simplified supply chain model is constructed that preserves the most important information related to the original full-range large-size chain and, in the same time, is sufficiently complete to assist the decision-makers to select anti-risk programs based primarily on the principles of the best available technologies.