Impact of Optimizing Vegetable Freshness on Agri-Food Supply Chain Design

Some characteristics of vegetables such as freshness have a great impact on their management and on the supply chain performance. However, this characteristic is not usually considered in strategic decision support models. To fill this gap, this paper proposes a multi-objective mixed integer linear programming model for supply chain design that includes tactical decisions related to the production and distribution of vegetables and simultaneously optimize supply chain profits and the average freshness of sold vegetables. The purpose of this paper is to determine whether maximizing the average freshness of the vegetables sold impacts on the supply chain design. To this end, the model is solved for eleven scenarios in which different weights are assigned to the objectives. The results obtained show how different supply chain configurations are generated depending on the weight assigned to each objective, proving the impact of maximizing the freshness of vegetables in the supply chain design.