Robustness-Improvement Strategy and Modeling under Uncertainty of Chinese Catering Service Supply Chain

Abstract

Catering Service Supply Chain (CSSC) is a new supply chain, of which Catering Service Integrator (CSI) is in the center accompany with Functional Catering Service Provider (FCSP). The core objective of CSSC is to provide different catering enterprises with supply chain services. Instability, non-standardization, specialty and diversity characteristics of the Chinese catering industry inevitably lead to demand uncertainty of CSSC, directly resulting in the uncertainty of operation and supply side. The uncertainty of supply chain system is the basis of robust optimization study, under the influence of uncertainty, robustness is extremely important to ensure stable income and continuous operation of supply chain. This research classifies various uncertainty scenarios, based on robust optimization method. Two strategies, service coordination with widely knowledge sharing, and synchronous decision with intelligent inducement, are designed to induce and integrate personalized demand to get the scale effect and the coordination of the entire supply chain. From a point of quantitative view, this research builds up robust optimization model to improve robustness of CSSC, deposing the target into two coordinated parts. The coordination is of great sense, including two objectives simultaneously, the first one aims to maximize the delivery rate of order demand, the second one aims to optimize profit of CSI and FCSP. According to data examination, the coordinative strategies and robust optimization model can effectively control the uncertainty of the whole supply chain, and then improve the robustness of CSSC.