Designing a Closed-loop Supply Chain Network Considering Social Factors; A Case Study on Avocado Industry

•Designing a closed-loop supply chain network for avocado industry.•Formulating a MILP model to optimize the costs and job employment opportunity.•Considering forward and reverse logistics to deliver the goods and returned products.•Utilizing exact method to validate and investigate the proposed problem on our case.•Conducting sensitivity analyses for further investigate and managerial insights. Recently, the closed-loop supply chain (CLSC) and its application to various fields have been an area of great interest. Despite the importance of CLSC, there remains a paucity of evidence on agriculture in this area. In this work, a CLSC network for the avocado industry is firstly designed by developing a bi-objective model considering the costs of the avocado industry and the social factor of job employment opportunities. The two objectives are the total costs minimization and job employment maximization in various opened locations. To validate the proposed model, a real case study in Puebla, Mexico, is addressed. The GAMS software and its CPLEX solver are utilized to find the best optimum solutions and determine the best locations to open different centers. The applicability of the proposed network is verified by conducting several sensitivity analyses on the important parameters of the problem. According to the obtained results, demand has the most effect on this network in which that a 25 percent decrease in demand can increase the total cost (the first objective) up to 40 percent and improve employment efficiency (the second objective) up to around 30 percent, simultaneously.