GOALI: A System Theoretical Framework for Modeling, Analysis and Closed-loop Management of Supply Chains of Perishable Products

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An estimated one in nine citizens on Earth suffer from hunger, while about one third of the food produced for human consumption is wasted. Reducing waste of perishable foods is key to addressing world hunger owing to their essential role in a healthy diet. These products decay relatively quickly; their viability ranges from a few days to a few weeks, which is comparable to the time that they spend in the harvesting-to-market delivery supply chain. Effective supply chain management for perishable products to minimize waste therefore is a high priority. This can be accomplished by actively setting environmental conditions (e.g., temperature, humidity) during transportation and storage, and by optimizing the timing and quantity of shipments and deliveries. This project will create a new approach for the optimal management of the supply chain of perishable products by accounting for product decay, product demand uncertainty, and variability in the quality and degradation speed of naturally grown products. Computational implementations that are scalable to the supply chain networks encountered in industry will be developed and validated with data from an existing avocado supply chain. Preliminary simulation results indicate a potential 15% reduction in food waste and up to 30% reduction in energy consumption for refrigerated storage. Commensurate reductions in overall supply chain cost and in the price of food are expected, along with reductions in CO2 emissions. The research results are expected to chart a clear path towards reducing food insecurity in the United States and globally. The results of this work will be directly applicable to the management of supply chains of other time-critical products, such as vaccines and transplant organs. The project will support the training of graduate and undergraduate researchers, who will be actively recruited from underrepresented groups, and the development of new curriculum materials for undergraduate education. This project will lead to a new system-theoretical foundation for the optimal management of perishable-product supply chains. The proposed framework uniquely unites concepts from production planning, reaction engineering and nonlinear system dynamics, and optimal feedback control, to create an urgently needed supply chain management framework for perishable products. Specific novel fundamental contributions include, i) a state space representation of the evolution of product inventory and quality as a function of environmental conditions, ii) state estimation techniques for inventory and quality based on the (limited) set of measurements that are available in practice, and iii) collaborative distributed control strategies that are scalable and account for the structural properties of a supply chain comprising numerous, geographically distributed and economically diverse entities. These strategies rely on feedback to mitigate the uncertainty inherent to supply chain operations and to the decay rates of biological products. The results of this project will have a transformative effect on the way academics and practitioners approach the management of supply chains of perishable products and, more generally, on accounting for the dynamics and uncertainty present in the operation of supply chains and other instances of large-scale storage networks.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.