Responsive Perishable Food Supply Chains: Robustness & Resilience

This project investigates the development of strategies for robust and resilient perishable food supply chains (PFSCN). The research focuses on network design and distribution plans to enhance responsiveness to fluctuating demands, considering the challenges posed by the short lifecycles and quality decay of perishable goods. The project addresses uncertainties inherent in PFSCNs, such as those related to product perishability, climate dependency, and regulatory compliance. The methodology involves a review of existing literature on supply chain robustness and resilience, exploring sources of uncertainty, evaluation metrics, and optimization models. The project aims to provide insights into how PFSCNs can be designed to withstand disruptions and maintain operational effectiveness, ultimately improving customer satisfaction and supply chain performance. Qualitative and quantitative research methods, including interviews and case studies, will be employed to gather data and inform the development of effective strategies.

Running header: ROBUSTNESS AND RESILIENCE
Responsive Perishable Food Supply Chains: Robustness and Resilience
Student’s Name
Intuitional Affiliation

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Introduction
Better communication has enabled customers to request for goods and service from all
over the world and delivered to them without having to travel. For any business to take on
international, it has to develop a Strong Supply Chain Network (SCN). A strong supply chain
network ensures there is a better and strong link better the customer and the firm where they can
communicate in the easiest way possible. Perishable Food Supply Chain Network (PFSCN) is
an example of a Strong supply chain network (Gorissen, Yanıkoğlu, & den Hertog, 2015). It is
practically affected by natural characteristics of products such that they have a short life cycle
which makes the value and quality of perishable food products decrease once they are produced.
Therefore, a firm dealing with perishables goods should develop strategies for PFSCN designs
and distribution mechanism to give better responsiveness to the varying demands.
PFSCN is faced with uncertainties which it has no control that affects its operations. For
example, PFSCN is dependent on the production and supply of farm-based, climate dependent
customers and tough legislation concerning distribution, production of its commodity. For the
PFSCN to operate under its uncertainties and meets its objective, it will have to make its supply
chain robust and resilient. Robustness and resilient of the supply chain has been challenging
topics in business management and several authors have reviewed them. According to these
authors review, Resilient supply chain is a business operation that can bounce back to initial
position when a disruption occurs. The bouncing back process includes a variety of states,
including the step undertaken before the disruption occurs, step undertakes to lessen the damage
of the disruption and the final step involves the recovery process (Ukraintseva, Yashin, &
Arbeev, 2016).

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Supply chain robustness is referred to as the ability of a supply chain to avoid or resist
change. The robustness characteristics permits a organization to uphold its purposes against
external and internal challenges (Bertsimas, Gupta, & Kallus, 2018) To understand supply chain
robustness; one have to recognize system perturbations and functions. It is vital to recognize
robustness helps in upholding functions of a organization rather than organization states, that
differentiates it from stability and resilient. The difference between Supply chain robustness and
Resilient supply chain is that robustness doesn’t give room for change in its characteristics while
resilient is flexible. The use of both robust and resilient chain of supply in PFSCN enables firms
to work per its objective and help to reduce the risk that may occur as a result of its uncertainties.
Project Description
The project concentrates on a supply chain where the values of products decrease in time,
focuses on the developing strategies for network design and distribution plans that provide
greater responsiveness to varying demands. To carry out the project, there is a need to develop a
research question to guide throughout the project analyses.
Below are some possible analyses:
What is the source of uncertainties? How to evaluate, resilience, robustness and
Responsiveness evaluation? What performance measures available for uncertain
Environments? How to articulate optimization models which incorporate these resilience

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robustness, responsiveness deliberations for controlling uncertainties? How would sales
forecasting accuracy impact optimal network designs? ( Esfahani, & Kuhn, 2018).) In what way
to build the situations of commodity demands for stochastic prototypes? What are the best
distribution strategies and network strategies under petition uncertainties?
Methodology
Each SCN has an exact design in the sense of network planning and formation and
control system. The PFSCN has the following characteristics that make the design process
different from other SCN. It has a shelf life constraints of its products, quality decay of products,
and food safety challenges due to the nature of the products being perishable. The PFSCN has
long production throughput production seasonality,time and necessity for quality evaluation
which makes the production complex. The PFSCN requires a variability of commodity quality
and supply amount of farm-based inputs. Finally, the PFSCN has climate dependent custumers
requests and regulation regarding food distribution,production, quality of products and trade,
throughout the year(Capano & Woo,2017).
SCN activities and processes depends on external and environmental factors. Changes in,
economic, markets, geographical, technological, cultural factors and social, political and legal
systems and rivalry can be categorized as external features that contribute to uncertainty,
dynamics and complexity in SCNs (Salter, 2018.). The sources of ambiguity in the supply chain
is due to the timing, quantity timing and requirement of end-customer demand. In PFSCN supply

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and process uncertainties have a important role. The uncertainty present in a PFSCN can be
evident in the characteristic of the information, material, and financial flow.
Research Method
To eliminate uncertainties in the PFSCN, proper research is appropriate in finding the
best methods and procedure in eliminating uncertainties. Use of qualitative or quantitative
research methods could help in research where the qualitative method will be used to collect real
data while quantitative for the optimization models with stochastic demands. The use interview
would aid qualitative research where their customers would be questions about the PFSCN and
what they expect in PFSCN delivery of goods and services. Use of case studies will assist in
quantitative research.
The results from the research should be put into practice to enable PFSCN meets the
needs of its customers. The areas where the customers need the PFSCN to improve its services
and goods should be put into practice to eliminate uncertainties in its operations.

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References
Bertsimas, D., Gupta, V., & Kallus, N. (2018). Data-driven robust optimization. Mathematical
Programming, 167(2), 235-292.
Gorissen, B. L., Yanıkoğlu, İ., & den Hertog, D. (2015). A practical guide to robust
optimization. Omega, 53, 124-137.
Esfahani, P. M., & Kuhn, D. (2018). Data-driven distributionally robust optimization using the
Wasserstein metric: Performance guarantees and tractable reformulations. Mathematical
Programming, 171(1-2), 115-166.
Ukraintseva, S., Yashin, A. I., & Arbeev, K. G. (2016). Resilience versus robustness in aging.
Capano, G., & Woo, J. J. (2017). Resilience and robustness in policy design: A critical
appraisal. Policy Sciences, 50(3), 399-426.
Salter, A. W. (2018). Institutional Resilience in Banking Systems. Available at SSRN 3281098.