A holonic framework for managing the sustainable supply chain in emerging economies with smart connected metabolism

Abstract Since their origins, human societies have integrated into the natural environment, where social metabolism that identified the interactions between society and nature was established. This social metabolism enables the flows of energy and materials between social and natural environments to be analyzed and quantified. However, in the last century, many societies have undergone a transformation from an agricultural to an industrial system. Thus, labour, as a generator of economic capital through the supply chain, has provoked a loss of natural and social capital, especially in emerging economies, thereby generating the metabolic rift. This situation can be mitigated and reversed through a circular economy, the use of digital and technological enablers of Industry 4.0 and the incorporation of an organizational enabler such as the holonic paradigm. The integration of these enablers has given rise to the development of the cyber-physical holon, which incorporates inherently sustainable concepts and allows the analysis of distributed complex systems. This paper proposes a holonic framework for multiscale and multilevel Adaptive and Integrated Sustainable Supply Chain Management (AISSCM). This framework supports a smart connected social metabolism integrated within the natural environment and oriented towards mitigation and reversal of the metabolic rift, through the processes of adaptation and integration to enable the co-evolution of the supply chain within the environment. The framework developed is applied to a family of products through their sustainable supply chain based on circularity. This proposal is developed to enable the necessary transition towards sustainable societies.