管理科学与工程系学术讲座

题目: Shipment Monitoring, Allocation and the Impact on Food Waste

装运监测、分配及对食物浪费的影响

演讲人: 芦涛，University of Connecticut

时间: 2024年3月25日上午 9:00

地点: 腾讯会议

会议号：951 566 995

会议密码：245125

讲座摘要:

Sensor technologies enable supply chain firms to monitor the condition of each product unit and allocate them to destination markets of different transportation distances based on their conditions. In this paper, we consider a firm purchasing and transporting a fresh produce for sale in two destination markets with uncertain demands. Post-harvest processes render a (possibly random) proportion of the product likely to spoil in transit. The longer the transportation distance, the higher the spoilage risk. The firm solves a two-stage optimization: It first determines a purchase quantity, and then decide how to allocate each unit (in either good or risky condition) between markets. We characterize the second-stage optimal allocation and then leverage the characterization to determine the optimal order quantity in the first stage. We find that, an intuitive greedy allocation rule, i.e., allocating risky units first to the nearer market, may not always be optimal. Furthermore, we show that monitoring technologies, despite being advocated for the potential to reduce food waste, may adversely increase the total waste. Although monitoring helps reduce spoilage in transit, it may induce a larger purchase quantity, more leftover units and possibly more waste in total. The adverse outcome happens for low-margin products with high demand variability or high vulnerability to spoilage. Therefore, as sensor technologies are increasingly used in transportation planning, for certain products, policymakers should provide firms with more incentives to reduce waste, instead of less.

演讲嘉宾简介:

Tao Lu is an assistant professor at the Department of Operations and Information Management, University of Connecticut. His research interests lie broadly in supply chain management, transport logistics, gig economy platforms, and socially responsible operations. His work has been published in premier academic journals such as Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Operations Research, Production and Operations Management, and Transportation Science. Prior to joining UConn, he taught at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University in the Netherlands. He is serving as an Associate Editor of the Service Science journal.