Sustainable cold supply chain design for livestock and perishable products using data-driven robust optimization

ABSTRACT

Food products are a critical part of everyday life. To increase the efficiency of the food supply chain, designing a comprehensive mathematical is necessary. This study tries to optimize a protein supply chain. This supply chain is divided into livestock and perishable products. The integration of these two supply chain echelons has been applied to create an extensive model. Moreover, sustainability has been considered as a competitive advantage in the chain. Perishable products are temperature-sensitive. Hence, a cold supply chain has been considered. The model has three objective functions: maximizing the total profit, minimizing the storage cost in the cold chain, minimizing the health risk. In dealing with uncertainty, a data-driven robust optimization method has been used. Therefore, this paper used machine learning to construct the uncertainty sets from historical data. The Torabi-Hassini method has been implemented to solve the multi-objective model. Finally, to show the applicability and efficiency of the proposed approach, a real-world case study on the poultry supply chain, including abattoirs, breeding centers, slaughtering, and selling branches, has been applied. The result shows that this methodology significantly influences total profits and improves the environmental criteria in a real-world case study. Moreover, different sensitivity analyses have been prepared to help managers make a trade-off between the robustness of the model and objective function value with various weights and calculate the influence of supply chain integration on objective functions.

Highlights

• A novel comprehensive mathematical model is developed to integrate livestock and perishable products in a sustainable supply chain.

• Cold supply chain management has been applied for fresh and frozen products.

• A machine learning mechanism has been used to deal with uncertain parameters.

• Sensitivity analysis and managerial tips are prepared according to real-world case study.

KEYWORDS:

• Perishable products
• sustainable supply chain
• data-driven robust
• livestock products
• cold chain
• food supply chain
• multi-objective optimization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding authors.