Abstract
Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has spread for over a year and affected many aspects, including the food supply chain. One of the ways COVID-19 has impacted the food supply chain is the food production capacity reduction. It is necessary to develop the optimum food supply chain strategy by determining the optimum food hub location and food network to maintain food security which robust against disruptions and uncertainties. In this study, Robust Optimization (RO) is applied to handle the uncertainties. Nevertheless, the actual uncertain data might be hard to be collected or even unavailable at the moment. Therefore, an innovative framework is proposed to integrate RO with Agent-Based Modelling (ABM). ABM is used to simulate the upstream actor of the food supply chain and predict the uncertain food production capacity, which RO later handles. Particularly, this study focused on rice supply chain. The result shows that the framework is able to handle the uncertain rice supply chain problem, in which the actual uncertain data might be unavailable, and give the robust optimum food hub location and food network. The food hub location and food network are obtained by solving the Robust Counterpart (RC) model with respect to the uncertainty set obtained from the ABM simulation result.
Highlights
According to WHO (2020a), COVID-19 was first emerged in Wuhan, China, on 31 December 2019
This paper proposes an integrated framework consisting of the Agent-Based Modelling (ABM) and Robust Optimization (RO) approach to solve food supply chain problems under uncertainties involving normal and pandemic conditions
This study focused on the rice supply chain problem, the proposed framework is applicable to any food supply chain problem in which the system could be described as a collection of components with their respective behaviour
Summary
According to WHO (2020a), COVID-19 was first emerged in Wuhan, China, on 31 December 2019. It was first identified in Indonesia on 02 March 2020 (Suryahadi et al, 2020). Border restrictions between countries are applied temporarily (Chen et al, 2020; Lawson-Lartego and Cohen, 2020; Zhao et al, 2020). These restrictions affected many aspects, including the food supply chain. Everyone is at risk to become infected by the virus, including the workers along the food supply chain In this case, any infected workers have to isolate themselves for a couple of days and caused the labour force in food supply chain becomes decreased, which results in the reduction of food production rate
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