Track: Supply Chain Management

Abstract

Maintaining a proper quality during export of perishables is a challenging issue as they degrade rapidly ones harvested. Hence, cold chain export is adopted. In order to deliver fresh and high-quality products to the end customer appropriate temperature-controlled distribution must be ensured. The current study targets ‘distribution at destination’ part of the cold chain taking into account the produce quality degradation. An optimization problem is formulated for minimizing the total cost of distribution of temperature sensitive perishables so that the desired quality produce reaches the customer in consumable condition. The temperature dependent overall quality of the produce is determined from a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation and Kinetic rate law model. The cold chain export of an Indian mango variety namely ‘Alphonso’ from India to Singapore has been illustrated as a case study. The results show that the developed distribution plan can assure the fulfilment of customer prerequisites at lowest cost.