Tactical and operational planning for socially responsible fresh agricultural supply chain

Abstract

Addressing an integrated decision-making structure for planting and harvesting scheduling may lead to more realistic, accurate, and efficient decision in fresh product supply chain. This study aims to develop an integrated bi-objective tactical and operational planning model for producing and distributing fresh crops. The first objective of the model is to maximize total revenue of supply chain. Over the past few years, there has been a considerable shift in emphasis in social responsibility of supply chains. Therefore, a key purpose of this article is to plan a socially responsible fresh agricultural supply chain as the second objective function. The proposed bi-objective model seeks to make optimal decisions on planting, harvesting scheduling (harvesting pattern), selecting the transport fleet type, and products supply channel to the consumers. To conduct the analysis, numerical examples are provided based on a real case study and the true Pareto front is achieved with augmented ε-constraint method. The results indicated the applicability of the proposed model and verified its validity. Moreover, comparison between total weighting and ε-constraint method is provided to ensure the efficiency of Pareto solutions.