Sustainable cold supply chain design for livestock and perishable products using data-driven robust optimization

Food products are a critical part of everyday life. To increase the efficiency of the food supply chain, designing a comprehensive mathematical is necessary. This study tries to optimize a protein supply chain. This supply chain is divided into livestock and perishable products. The integration of these two supply chain echelons has been applied to create an extensive model. Moreover, sustainability has been considered as a competitive advantage in the chain. Perishable products are temperature-sensitive. Hence, a cold supply chain has been considered. The model has three objective functions: maximizing the total profit, minimizing the storage cost in the cold chain, minimizing the health risk. In dealing with uncertainty, a data-driven robust optimization method has been used. Therefore, this paper used machine learning to construct the uncertainty sets from historical data. The Torabi-Hassini method has been implemented to solve the multi-objective model. Finally, to show the applicability and efficiency of the proposed approach, a real-world case study on the poultry supply chain, including abattoirs, breeding centers, slaughtering, and selling branches, has been applied. The result shows that this methodology significantly influences total profits and improves the environmental criteria in a real-world case study. Moreover, different sensitivity analyses have been prepared to help managers make a trade-off between the robustness of the model and objective function value with various weights and calculate the influence of supply chain integration on objective functions.