Multi-Product Multi Echelon Measurements of Perishable Supply Chain: Fuzzy Non-Linear Programming Approach

Abstract

The perishable milk products industry has to deal with multiple pressures such as demand forecasting, price fluctuations, lead time, order batching, and inflated orders along with difficulties of climatic and traffic conditions, storage areas and shipment in unfavorable circumstances. The Indian dairy industry faces immense wattage issue due to improper infrastructure for the cold chain storage facilities, resulting in unsatisfied customers. A study is undertaken to comprehend the supply chain framework that handles perishability issues in production and distribution. Researchers propose a multi-objective mixed-integer non-linear supply chain coordination model under uncertain environments to minimize the cost of transportation, offset wastage of products and neutralize the losses due to insufficiencies of transit and storage amenities. The proposed model is meant for managing the delivery with lesser deterioration losses for producers, warehouses, and retailers. The model considers various costs for holding, halting, discounts on purchased cost, transportation cost for truckload policy under regular and unforeseen circumstances of curfew, and identify the rate of deterioration to know the impact on the cost for all players involved in the SCM framework. To handle uncertainty of objective functions, fuzzy set concepts and the defuzzification method are imposed, and fuzzy non-linear programming algorithms are used to get the single objective function from the defuzzified multi-objective functions. Data analysis is done on Lingo 18.0 software. Rate of deterioration is highest for the warehouse, which indicates that efforts should be made to augment warehouse facilities for less spoilage to reduce losses in cost. Finally, the study ends with main findings, conclusions, limitations and future scopes.