Closed-loop food supply chain with returnable transport items and uncertain production capacity

Ding Chen (1, 2) , Feng Chu (1) , Lijun Tian (2)

1 IBISC - Informatique, BioInformatique, Systèmes Complexes
2 School of Economics and Management

Inspired by the fact that production capacity in the food industry is uncertain due to unexpected events, such as downtime, this work investigates a stochastic closed-loop supply chain for multiple perishable foods that are carried by returnable transport items, where production capacity is uncertain. For the new problem, we propose a non-linear chance-constrained model. Then it is transformed into a mixed-integer linear programming model via the sampling average approximation and the distribution-free methods such that it can be solved by commercial solvers, like CPLEX. Numerical experiments on randomly generated instances show that the distribution-free method performs better than the average approximation method. Some managerial insights are also presented and discussed.

Keywords: Closed-loop food supply chain; Returnable transport items; Uncertain production capacity

Domains: Operations Research [math.OC]

Ding Chen, Feng Chu, Lijun Tian. Closed-loop food supply chain with returnable transport items and uncertain production capacity. 20th IEEE International Conference on Networking, Sensing and Control (ICNSC 2023), Oct 2023, Marseille, France. pp.1-6, ⟨10.1109/ICNSC58704.2023.10319020⟩. ⟨hal-04361568⟩