Modeling of an IoT-enabled supply chain for perishable food with two-echelon supply hubs
| Pages | 1890-1905 |
| Date | 16 October 2017 |
| Published date | 16 October 2017 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/IMDS-10-2016-0456 |
| Author | Yingfeng Zhang,Lin Zhao,Cheng Qian |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Information systems,Data management systems,Knowledge management,Knowledge sharing,Management science & operations,Supply chain management,Supply chain information systems,Logistics,Quality management/systems |
Modeling of an IoT-enabled
supply chain for perishable food
with two-echelon supply hubs
Yingfeng Zhang and Lin Zhao
Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China, and
Cheng Qian
Department of Industrial Engineering,
Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China
Abstract
Purpose –The huge demand for fresh goods has stimulated lots of research on the perishable food supply
chain. The characteristics of perishable food and the cross-regional transportation have brought many
challenges to the operation models of perishable food supply chain. The purpose of this paper is to address
these challenges based on the real-time data acquired by the Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
Design/methodology/approach –IoT and the modeling of the Supply Hub in Industrial Parks were
adopted in the perishable food supply chain.
Findings –A conceptual model was established for the IoT-enabled perishable food supply chain with
two-echelon supply hubs. The performance of supply chain has improved when implementing the proposed
model, as is demonstrated by a case study.
Originality/value –By our model, the supply hubs which act as the dominators of the supply chain can
respond to the real-time information captured from the operation processes of an IoT-enabled supply chain,
thus to provide public warehousing and logistic services.
Keywords Internet of Things, Conceptual model, Supply chain for perishable food, Two-echelon supply hubs
Paper type Research paper
Nomenclature
d
lj
Quantity of product jorderedbyretailerl;
D
j
Total demanded quantity of product j;
R
k
Demanded quantity for material k;
a
ij
Quantity of raw material iused to
produce product j;
x
ij
Quantity of product jin the order
assigned to processor i;
y
ij
Quantity of product jin the order that
processor isubjectively applies for;
S
ij
The satisfactory of processor ifor
getting the order of product j;
w
ij
A positive weight assigned to product j
of processor i;
λ
i
A positive weight assigned to processor i;
C
ij
The cost of supply chain when
processor iproduces product j.
1. Introduction
Millions of people are increasing their spending on fresh, delicious but perishable and
expensive goods like fruits, seafood, etc. According to the AQSIQ Statistics Report,
the demand for salmon (which is a kind of popular seafood) imported to China has increased
Industrial Management & Data
Systems
Vol. 117 No. 9, 2017
pp. 1890-1905
Emerald Publishing Limited
0263-5577
DOI 10.1108/IMDS-10-2016-0456
Received 31 October 2016
Revised 18 February 2017
Accepted 23 March 2017
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0263-5577.htm
© Yingfeng Zhang, Lin Zhao and Cheng Qian. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article
is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce,
distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial &
non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full
terms of this licence may be seen at: http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
1890
IMDS
117,9
from 74 thousand tons in 2003 to 283.8 thousand tons in 2013 (www.aqsiq.gov.cn/zjsj/tjxx/tjsj/).
The huge demand for perishable food has stimulated the development of many related
profit-making industries greatly, e.g., the cultivating, processing, and transportation of the
perishable products. These activities are connected throughout the operations of the supply
chain for perishable food (SCPF ).
Nowadays, the supply chain revolution is reshaping a lot of industries through
reconsidering the organizations, people, activities, information, and resource flow which
are involved in moving a product or service from supplier to customer as a system
(Bowersox et al., 2007). The supply chain management implies a highly effective network
of business relations that serves to improve efficiency by eliminating duplicate and
nonproductive work. Thus, the profit-makers are increasingly paying more attention on
the operations of SCPF which is known as the farm-to-fork sequence. These operations are
intended to satisfy the huge market demand and expand in market shares, including
farming (i.e. land cultivation and production of crops), processing, inspection, packaging,
warehousing, transportation, distribution, and marketing (Iakovou et al., 2014).
However, the performance of SCPF is frequently challenged by the characteristics of
perishable food and the cross-regional logistics activities (Zhang, Wang, and Liu, 2017).
The 2008 FMI/GMA Unsaleable Report on perishable food estimated that the total
unsaleable goods has increased $3-$5 billion in 2010 (Grunow and Piramuthu, 2013).
These challenges mainly fell into three categories. The first one is the consumers’
decreasing tolerance of the degradation of perishable food. The second one is the possible
lack of supervision that may cause the unsaleable goods flow into the market, threatening
the consumers’health. The third ch allenge is the urgent need to reduce the high
operational cost of supply chain and to improve the operational efficiency.
Faced with these challenges, the perishable food industry should reconsider the current
operational models of supply chain and upgrade the supply chain management systems,
so that the supply chains can deal with the unpredictable situations better, and meet the
quality requirements for food consistently (Eksoz et al., 2014). In this paper, we analyzed
the existing problems and proposed a conceptual model for SCPF to transport perishable
goods timely, safely, and economically.
Considering the time value of perishable foods, the cross-regional supply chain operation,
and the industrial characteristics of perishable food, some research questions that the SCPF
is facing are listed as follows:
RQ1. How to design an overall architecture for the timely circulations of the SCPF
operational information and for the dynamic cooperation among different nodes of
a supply chain?
RQ2. How to design a conceptual model of supply chains to meet the requirements for
industrial operations of perishable food and to quickly respond to market changes
under the environment of real-time information sharing?
RQ3. How to design a dynamic optimization method for the order allocation of
perishable food to improve the performance of the supply chain?
To address the above challenges and research questions, our research adopted the Internet
of Things (IoT) technology and the theory of the Supply Hub in Industrial Parks (SHIPs).
IoT is defined as a dynamic global network infrastructure where objects are
connected, monitored, and optimized through either wired, wireless, or hybrid systems
(Atzori et al., 2010; Giusto et al., 2010; de Saint-Exupery, 2009). In recent years, the
advancement in IoT such as radio frequency identification (RFID), sensor technology,
communication modules, microprocessors, and actuators has offered much broader potential
in the real-life implementations (Qiu et al., 2015). Specially, sensor technology which can be
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Modeling of an
IoT-enabled
SCPF-2ESH
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