Research Of Multi-objective Robust Optimization For Food Cold Chain With Uncertain Market Demands

Firstly,the characteristics of the food cold chain compared with the general supply chain were summarized as follows:stronger system requirements,keeping Low temperature in the whole process;high technology request,needing professional support of refrigeration facilities;huge fore-investment,high later stage operating costs;short turnaround time,etc.Then,this paper analyzed the uncertainties of food cold chain from three stages according to the characteristics of the food cold chain.These uncertainties brought risks.According to the experience of the case study,proposed preventive measures before the occurrence of the food cold chain risk and emergency measures after the occurrence of the risk.Then,robust strategies were proposed to reduce qualitatively the risk of the food cold chain brought by the uncertainties.This paper determined the core of the robust strategies was increasing the number of resources,after the analysis of the uncertainty of food cold chain,the connection and difference between flexibility and robustness of supply chain,for example,increasing the number of suppliers,etc.Through analyzing some real cases and studying a large amount of documents,the paper proposed the robust strategies from four aspects:supply,demand,product and information.Furthermore,quantitative analysis was carried out to establish a multi-stage food cold chain's multi-objective robust optimization model with uncertain market demands,meeting multiple conflicting objectives.This model was described as a nonlinear multi-objective programming model and satisfied three conflict objectives:the maximum profit of all participants considering carbon emissions cost;the maximum inventory security level of all participants;the maximum robustness of decision.Uncertain demands of market were described by discrete scenario method with determining probability.The satisfaction degree of multiple objectives was defined by using the linear increasing membership function.The satisfaction degree of all the objectives was aggregated by the specific triangular fuzzy function.Eventually,this paper made the overall Nash-type satisfactory level maximum.Firstly,with the development of low carbon economy,the cold chain was a special supply chain with high energy consumption and high carbon emissions,it was necessary and urgent to consider the cost of carbon emissions and reduce carbon emissions;furthermore,the uncertainty of market demand was one of the most important uncertainties in food cold chain.Therefore,the first objective of the multi objectives,"Maximizing the profit of all members" took into account the cost of carbon emissions,and the model was built under the market demand uncertainty.Finally,this article designed a numerical case to inspect the model,and solved it based on Matlab software.The result of the numerical case proved effectively that the inclusion of robustness measures as part of objectives can significantly reduce the variability of objective values to market demand uncertainties.The objective values were within the acceptable range,and the standard deviation of the objectives was significantly declined,this illustrated the effectiveness and good robustness of the constructed model.