Greening the food supply chain: an optimisation model for sustainable design of refrigerated automated warehouses

Abstract

In the past decade, many organisations have become much more conscious of sustainability with innovation in their manufacturing and supply chain management (Kusi-Sarpong, Gupta, and Sarkis 2019). This trend has been driven by several compelling observations and challenges. The earth is facing serious environmental degradation issues. Many economies are under stringent environmental legislations. Several highly disastrous industry accidents brought to light social sustainability issues in offshore production. Competition continues to intensify in many product and service sectors. Many global supply chains were severely disrupted by man-made or natural disasters. Consequently, many organisations have invested in capabilities to enhance their continuity of business and resilience to shocks, and/or have implemented strategies for improving environmental and social sustainability (Hsu et al. 2013; Tseng et al. 2019). Innovative concepts, technologies, and business models are often at the heart of these initiatives, enabling organisations to deliver superior value to stakeholders (Orji and Liu 2020). Large companies such as Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, and Walmart have been using a global data-collection platform to engage their suppliers to achieve transparency about the environmental impact (Dahlmann and Roehrich 2019). This special issue is created in order to explore the innovative sustainability for manufacturing and supply chain. It includes in total 13 research papers under the categories of positioning papers, framework related to supply chain network, enabling technologies, decision and business models, and industrial cases. The first paper entitled Sustainable innovation in the dairy supply chain: enabling factors for intermodal transportation, by Cannas Violetta, Ciccullo Federica, Pero Margherita, Cigolini Roberto, and Ruci Meriola, introduces an innovative sustainability in the diary supply chain by investigating how to ease the shift to intermodal railroad transportation. Through multiple case studies, this paper discusses a set of enablers of the shift such as a blueprint for innovative technology as well as logistics and business models. The second paper An innovative decision making framework for evaluating transportation service providers based on sustainable criteria, by Paul Ananna, Moktadir Md. Abdul, and Paul Sanjoy Kumar, demonstrates an innovative decision-making framework based on sustainable criteria to examine the transportation service providers. The proposed framework combines both qualitative and quantitative aspects for enabling a decision support tool for end-users.

Design of Green Cold Chain Networks for Imported Fresh Agri-Products in Belt and Road Development

“…Due to door openings; product removal/loading; and the heat conduction through doors, walls, roofs, and floors; the emission rate is positively correlated with the outdoor ambient temperature [4,6]. Consequently, the location of the DCs will affect the outdoor ambient temperature patterns, as well as the energy use and emissions, accordingly.…”

“…However, direct and general models to measure carbon emissions of DCs are rare. By combined use of the results and data from references [6,7], an expression for the carbon emission of DCs can be derived. Let T D j be the average annual temperature of a potential DC; its carbon emission for a given period (for example, a year), E j , is estimated as f (T D j ),where f (T D j ) is a relationship between the carbon emission and average annual temperature, and can be formulated as a monotonic increasing function with T D j .…”

“…Consequently, the location of the DCs will affect the outdoor ambient temperature patterns, as well as the energy use and emissions, accordingly. Meneghetti and Monti [6] conducted research on the sustainable design of refrigerated automated food warehouses. They published the yearly cost, energy consumption, and emissions of warehouses based on reference cases from different locations with different temperature patterns.…”

“…For example, if a customer at the city of Harbin demands a pitaya from Vietnam, the transportation distance inside China will be around 3516 kilometers from the port of Nanning to the city of Harbin, and the difference of the average temperatures between the two cities is up to 20 degrees centigrade. Due to door openings; product removal/loading; conduction through walls, roofs, and floors of the refrigerated warehouses and vehicles; and length of the journey; the heat transfer between the outside air and refrigerators is highly affected by the outdoor air temperatures [4][5][6][7]. Consequently, the outdoor ambient temperature conditions during transportation and storage will change the energy consumption for maintaining the set-point temperature.…”

Low-Carbon Warehousing: Examining Impacts of Building and Intra-Logistics Design Options on Energy Demand and the CO2 Emissions of Logistics Centers

“…This framework is not appropriate to evaluate measures or design options in the planning phase of warehouses that have not yet been built because of the need to meter actual energy use. The only known research study considering the energy relationship between intra-logistics and building technology as well as the effects on total energy demand came from Meneghetti et al [15]. They introduced an optimization model using constraint programming for the design of sustainable refrigerated automated storage and retrieval systems within food supply chains including energy requirements, both for refrigeration and system storage/retrieval operations.…”