A Hybrid Simulation Model to Facilitate Resilience in Short Food Supply Chains

Title data

Saliju, Suad ; Fikar, Christian:
A Hybrid Simulation Model to Facilitate Resilience in Short Food Supply Chains.
2022
Event: 32nd EURO Conference , 03.-06. July 2022 , Espoo, Finland.
(Conference item: Conference , Speech )

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Short food supply chains (SFSC) are seen as a solution towards more sustainable and resilient food supply chains. At the same time, however, an increasing number of disruptions, caused by severe natural hazard events and man-made disasters, have seen food supply chains severely affected. While the impact of disruptions on various supply chains have been extensively investigated, there is still a lack of research regarding their impact on food supply chains and particularly SFSC considering the perishability nature of food produces. The purpose of this work is to study the impact of demand and supply disruptions on SFSC and by introducing appropriate mitigation strategies. For this, a decision support tool is developed using a hybrid simulation modeling, which enables a cost-effective approach to address resilience in the context of SFSC. Unlike most work, the model developed incorporates both resilience, through the evaluation of various mitigation strategies, and sustainability, in terms of total post-harvest costs and food losses by integrating food quality function. The developed simulation model is demonstrated on a regional asparagus supply chain in Franconia, Germany. Results highlight the importance of enabling alternative distribution channels to both, facilitate resilience and reduce food losses.