an agri-fresh food supply chain network design with routing optimization: a case study of etka company

The supply chain network design (scnd) with perishability is an active research topic. the agri-fresh food supply chain (afsc) is a relevant topic to scnd and this study aims to model a new afsc for a real-world case study. regarding the traditional afsc, the geographically dispersed small farmers transport their product individually to market for selling. this leads to a higher transportation cost, which is the major cause of farmers’ low profitability. this paper formulates a traditional product movement model to represent the existing afsc. the concept of sharing economic approach is employed by the aggregate and collaborative transportation of products to minimize transportation inefficiency. this paper proposes an aggregate product movement with the vehicle routing model to re-design an afsc for a case study in iran based on the data of etka company-the largest domestic agri-fresh food supply chain. a four-echelon, multi-period, mixed integer non-linear programming (minlp) approach for the proposed location-inventory-routing model is formulated for perishable products via considering the clustering of farmers to minimize the total distribution cost. according to the comparison analysis, the location-inventoryrouting model is effective and leads to a reduction of 33% in total distribution cost compared to the present supply chain.