A sustainable inventory model considering a discontinuous transportation cost function and different sources of pollution

The economic ordering quantity (EOQ) is the first inventory model which has still being studying extensively till nowadays. Several considerations have been incorporated throughout the time such as backorders and imperfect quality. More recently, sustainability issues have also been introduced to the literature of inventory models remarking the increasing importance of the three bottom line: environment, social and economic criteria. In that sense, the aim of this research work is to develop a new sustainable inventory model considering a discontinuous transportation cost function and a new carbon emissions function to include different sources of pollution in the decision making process that are not taken into account using the traditional approaches in the inventory literature. The proposed inventory model permits to obtain a continuous and a discrete solution for the lot size and constitutes an easy-to-use process that can be implemented in a simple manner.