A Bi-objective Cold Supply Chain for Perishable Products Considering Quality Aspects: A Case Study in Iran Dairy Sector

Abstract

Improper handling in the food cold supply chain may compromise food safety and reduce quality, which can lead to economic losses and undesirable effects on food accessibility. Therefore, designing an efficient and reliable cold supply chain is extremely important for the company, suppliers, customers, and society. The majority of the traditional studies in the supply chain do not consider the cost of quality (prevention, appraisement, and failure) in supply chain network design. In this study, all dimensions of the cost of quality in a cold supply chain design such as the cost of quality related to suppliers and the cost of distribution service quality are investigated to close the problem to real-world conditions. Moreover, the quality of suppliers, manufacturers, and distributors is simultaneously considered throughout a supply chain with a new approach. To this end, the problem is formulated as a mathematical model for multi-item and multi-period cases considering two objective functions. The first objective function minimizes the total expected costs and the second objective function maximizes the total quality of the supply chain. The proposed bi-objective model has been transformed into a single-objective model by the solution of the parametric method (normalized weighted summation) and solved for a medium-sized instance considering data of a real-world case study. Computational results and analyzes indicate the efficiency of the proposed model as well as the exact solution method available for small and medium scales. The real case study which involves Kaleh Dairy Company is conducted to illustrate the potential of the proposed model and proper sensitivity analyses.