Recent advances and opportunities in sustainable food supply chain: a model-oriented review

Abstract

Faced with the challenges associated with sustainably feeding the world's growing population, the food industry is increasingly relying on operations research (OR) techniques to achieve economic, environmental and social sustainability. It is therefore important to understand the context-specific model-oriented applications of OR techniques in the sustainable food supply chain (SFSC) domain. While existing food supply chain reviews provide an excellent basis for this process, the explicit consideration of sustainability from a model-oriented perspective along with a structured outline of relevant SFSC research techniques are missing in extant literature. We attempt to fill this gap by reviewing 83 related scientific journal publications that utilise mathematical modelling techniques to address issues in SFSC. To this end, we first identify the salient dimensions that include economic, environmental and social issues in SFSC. We then review the models and methods that use these dimensions to solve issues that arise in SFSC. We identify some of the main challenges in analytical modelling of SFSC as well as future research directions.

Horizontal collaborative transport: survey of solutions and practical implementation issues

“…Over the past decades, sustainability in freight transport has become a major preoccupation in the field of logistics (McKinnon et al 2015;Zhu et al 2018). On one hand, freight transport is a lever for economic growth and on the other hand, it contributes significantly to problems such as CO 2 emissions, road accidents, and congestion in many countries (Piecyk and McKinnon 2010;Goldsby, Iyengar, and Rao 2014).…”

Modelling of sustainable food grain supply chain distribution system: a bi-objective approach

“…Recently, an interesting and insightful mathematical model oriented review of the extant literature focusing on Sustainable Food Supply Chain (SFSC) domain was conducted by Esteso et al (2018) and Zhu et al (2018). They clearly highlighted the need of the development of mathematical programming models to support the decision making process of FSC in developing countries.…”

“…Existing research work of Banasik et al (2019), Mohammed and Wang (2017b), Seuring (2013), Maiyar and Thakkar (2017), Brandenburg et al (2014) and Wang et al (2019) argued the growing attention of environmental impact of FSC activities along with the economic influence. New mathematical models are necessary to improve the food supply chain in developing nations by integrating sustainability, multiple time periods, integration of procurement, transportation and storage decisions (Esteso et al 2018, Zhu et al 2018. They also emphasised the integration of economic and environmental aspects and their conflicting nature and multi-objective modelling in SFSC domain.…”

“…The process leads to the production of greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, wastages of resources and production of emissions are two main consequences of food losses (FAO 2013; Zhu et al 2018). Additionally, food loss is one of the major causes of significant environmental impact along with economic and social impacts (Dreyer et al 2019;Lemaire and Limbourg 2019;Scholz et al 2015).…”

How to Support Group Decision Making in Horticulture: An Approach Based on the Combination of a Centralized Mathematical Model and a Group Decision Support System

“…For that, multicriteria or multi-objective decision support tools should be developed that take into account the three dimensions of sustainability. [19] propose hybrid-modelling approaches to cope with the complexity of real-world Sustainable Food SC in order to obtain managerial insights.…”