Integrated Production-Distribution Planning for Perishable Products in Sustainable Cold Supply-Chains

This paper investigates the problem of integrated production and distribution planning for perishable products with fixed shelf life in a sustainable cold supply-chain. We consider that a manufacturer produces and distributes multiple cold perishable products to multiple distribution centers. Special refrigeration rooms are part of the storage facilities, which are designed to meet the unique refrigeration requirements of individual product types during storage. The direct shipment is executed by limited homogeneous refrigerator trucks. The problem is modeled as a mixed integer programming to reduce the total cost which includes production, set-up, inventory, shipping and energy consumption cost. Computational tests are performed to investigate the effects of some critical parameters on the optimal integrated plan in several stages of the supplychain.