Reliability supply chain network design model for perishable products

The classical supply chain network(SCN)design problem is extended,where the candidate facilities are subject to failure and the products are prone to elapsed time deteriorion.First,the reliable SCN design problem is defined by introducing the probability that a facility may be prone to inactivity based on the analysis of perishable product characteristics.The perishable product SCN design problem is formulated as a 0-1 integer programming model.The objective is to minimize the weighted sum of the operating cost(the fixed plus transportation cost)and the expected failure cost.And then,the perishable product SCN design model is discussed and solved using the genetic algorithm(GA).The results show how to generate the tradeoff curve between the operating costs and the expected failure costs.And these tradeoff curves demonstrate empirically that substantial improvements in reliability are often possible with minimal increase in the operating costs.

Intermodal Freight Network Design for Transport of Perishable Products

The amount of perishable products transported via the existing intermodal freight networks has significantly increased over the last years. Perishable products tend to decay due to a wide range of external factors. Supply chain operations mismanagement causes waste of substantial volumes of perishable products every year. The heretofore proposed mathematical models optimize certain supply chain processes and reduce decay of perishable products, but primarily deal with local production, inventory, distribution, and retailing of perishable products. However, significant quantities of perishable products are delivered from different continents, which shall increase the total transportation time and decay potential of perishable products as compared to local deliveries. This paper proposes a novel optimization model to design the intermodal freight network for both local and long-haul deliveries of perishable products. The objective of the model aims to minimize the total cost associated with transportation and decay of perishable products. A set of piecewise approximations are applied to linearize the non-linear decay function for each perishable product type. CPLEX is used to solve the problem. Comprehensive numerical experiments are conducted using the intermodal freight network for import of the seafood perishable products to the United States to draw important managerial insights. Results demonstrate that increasing product decay cost may significantly change the design of intermodal freight network for transport of perishable products, cause modal shifts and affect the total transportation time and associated costs.

COORDINATING PRICING, ORDERING AND ADVERTISING FOR PERISHABLE PRODUCTS OVER AN INFINITE HORIZON

Numerous empirical studies show that advertising effort can stimulate demand in both current and future periods, and there is an interaction between pricing, advertising and ordering decisions. How do these decisions interact with each other and what is the effect of advertising on pricing and ordering decisions？ To understand this interaction, we consider a newsvendor-type firm that sells a perishable product in a stable market and dynamically determines the joint ordering, pricing and advertising strategies. The problem is modeled as an infmite horizon newsvendor problem with an advertising carryover effect and price-sensitive demand. We characterize the optimal pricing, advertising and inventory strategies and their comparative statics, and consider how this policy differs from the traditional approach without the advertising effect. We show that the optimal effective advertising level is monotonically increasing with the effective advertising level in the previous period, and hence the optimal strategies （advertising, pricing, inventory level） globally converge to the steady states in the long run. We numerically show that the optimal policy can reap significant profit, which underscores the importance of the advertising-driven ordering and pricing strategies.

Production plan for perishable agricultural products with two types of harvesting

Many crops in China have two or more harvesting methods;however,little research has focused on this phenomenon.The current study proposes an operational model that looks to maximize grower profits.This model considers a production plan for a perishable crop that has two harvesting methods:harvesting unripe produce at a lower operational cost but with a long lead time,and harvesting ripe crops at a higher operational cost but with quick turnaround.This study proposes a heuristic algorithm by which to pinpoint the optimal plan for the model;the model results indicate that for a crop with two harvesting methods,significant savings can be obtained by applying an optimal production plan.The current study’s main contribution is a production model for crops that feature two harvesting methods and for which the market poses varying demands.

Cyber Secure Framework for Smart Containers Based on Novel Hybrid DTLS Protocol

The Internet of Things (IoTs) is apace growing, billions of IoT devicesare connected to the Internet which communicate and exchange data among eachother. Applications of IoT can be found in many fields of engineering and sciencessuch as healthcare, traffic, agriculture, oil and gas industries, and logistics. Inlogistics, the products which are to be transported may be sensitive and perishable, and require controlled environment. Most of the commercially availablelogistic containers are not integrated with IoT devices to provide controlled environment parameters inside the container and to transmit data to a remote server.This necessitates the need for designing and fabricating IoT based smart containers. Due to constrained nature of IoT devices, these are prone to different cybersecurity attacks such as Denial of Service (DoS), Man in Middle (MITM) andReplay. Therefore, designing efficient cyber security framework are required forsmart container. The Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) Protocol hasemerged as the de facto standard for securing communication in IoT devices.However, it is unable to minimize cyber security attacks such as Denial of Serviceand Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) during the handshake process. Themain contribution of this paper is to design a cyber secure framework by implementing novel hybrid DTLS protocol in smart container which can efficientlyminimize the effects of cyber attacks during handshake process. The performanceof our proposed framework is evaluated in terms of energy efficiency, handshaketime, throughput and packet delivery ratio. Moreover, the proposed framework istested in IoT based smart containers. The proposed framework decreases handshake time more than 9% and saves 11% of energy efficiency for transmissionin compare of the standard DTLS, while increases packet delivery ratio andthroughput by 83% and 87% respectively.

Inventory Policy and Heuristic for Long-Term Multi-product Perishable Inventory Routing Problem with Static Demand

This work considers a long-term Perishable Inventory Routing Problem with multiple products,static demand,and single vehicle,in the setting of Vendor Managed Inventory.By analyzing the optimal solutions of long-term cases that can be solved in Python+Gurobi within 2 h,we capture some patterns of optimal solutions.Utilizing these patterns,experiments show that under certain conditions,the mathematical models of multi-product problems could be simplified to single-product problems,which have the same optimal solutions while taking less time to solve.Managerial insights were generated that for products with static demand in the long term,delivery should be arranged at the store level rather than at the product level.Products in the same store should have the same delivery pattern,no matter how different the unit holding costs are.By further analyzing the optimal solutions of the simplified models,we find that optimal value will stabilize in the long term,and the optimal solution is very close to the solution point where total inventory holding cost and transportation cost are close.Based on these findings,we have developed a heuristic that always provides optimal or close-to-optimal solutions with far less computational time,compared with Python+Gurobi.

The risk management of perishable supply chain based on coloured Petri Net modeling

The supply chain of perishable products is a combination of information organization,sharing and integration.The information modeling of supply chain is constructed to abstract key quality information including environment information,processing procedures and product quality assessments based on principle of quality safety factors and property of decay rate.The coloured Petri Net is applied for integrated description of independent information classification,aiming at risk identification and risk management framework.Well,according to the quality deterioration tendency,risk grades management and decision-making system are established.Practically,the circulation system of aquatic products is studied in this paper for full processing description.The simulation experiments are manipulated on environmental information,processing information and product quality information by the coloured Petri Net.Eventually,the conclusion turns out precisely as such that the coloured Petri Net conclusive for information classification and information transmission while integrated information management is available of efficient risk identification and decision-making system in supply chain of perishable products.Meanwhile,the validity of evaluating management and shelf-life estimation of perishable products are technically feasible.