Advanced preservation policy for deteriorating products during transportation and at retailer within a supply chain

Abstract

This paper contains a two-echelon supply chain model for deteriorating products considering advanced preservation policy during transportation and at retailer. The recent innovations regarding preservation of food products include several types of preservation technologies to reduce the deterioration rate. Use of such technologies increases the supply chain profit of such fixed lifetime products. Unlike other studies, who proposed continuous reduction in rates of deterioration with investment in preservation technology, we focus on more real circumstances by proposing model of such a preservation policy that minimizes the effects of deterioration in a way that magnitude of decrease in deterioration reduces for additional investment in preservation technology. The model is validated with numerical experiment by considering a case study on fresh fruits. Implication of investment in preservation technology is illustrated by evaluating increase in product’s life time and profit which authenticates the proposed model.