E-commerce in Fresh Food Supply Chain in China and its role on Quality performance

E-commerce companies have experienced a competitive environment in China, large companies benefit from more funding and talent, which puts a huge burden on small and medium size companies to find an effective way to manage quality with less investment. This paper gives a fresh food SC system’s view and analysis of improving fresh food quality. This paper focuses on small and medium-sized enterprises to analyse how companies can improve product quality through effective supply chain management, while ensuring the company's profitability. Using interviews with knowledgeable middle level managers in the SC, an analysis is carried out. The findings could help e-commerce companies in China strengthen their SC network and offer better quality standard of fresh food. Scarce literature discusses about fresh food e-commerce SCs in China, this research developed a basis background and knowledge. Nowadays, technology changes SC in various ways, this research explored how the advanced technology can be applied in fresh food SC. Some recommendations to companies that operate in this sector are provided. The limitations and future research directions of the fresh food supply chain are drawn

Optimizing Terminal Delivery of Perishable Products considering Customer Satisfaction

Freshness of products and timeliness of delivery are two critical factors which have impact on customer satisfaction in terminal delivery of perishable products. This paper investigates how to make a cost-saving vehicle scheduling for perishable products by maximizing customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is defined from the two aspects of freshness and time window. Then we develop a priority function based on customer satisfaction and use the hierarchical clustering method to identify customer service priority. Based on the priority, a multiobjective vehicle scheduling optimization model for perishable products is formulated to maximize customer satisfaction and minimize total delivery costs. To solve the proposed model, a priority-based genetic algorithm (PB-GA) is designed. Numerical experiments and sensitivity analysis are performed to show the validity and advantage of our approach. Results indicate that PB-GA can achieve better solutions than traditional genetic algorithm. The improvement of customer satisfaction is higher than the decrease rate of total costs within a certain shelf life range, which reveals that the proposed method is applicable to the terminal delivery of perishable products

Implementation of IoT and blockchain for temperature monitoring in COVID19 vaccine cold chain logistics

The current COVID-19 pandemic impacted globally and resulted one hundred million cases with almost two and half million death to-date. The concerns of further spread of the virus has caused the global economy to a halt when most countries globally implementing movement control. Recent approved vaccines developed by multiple fronts has shed some hoped for the recovery of the human activities back to pre-pandemic state. For Malaysia, the government has procured the vaccine from six suppliers and each vaccine require proper temperature monitoring to ensure the safety and the efficacy of the vaccines during transportation and distribution process. Effective vaccine Cold Chain Logistics (CCL) management will be required precise coordination and cooperation across multiple parties to ensure the quality of the vaccines which require temperature monitoring, distribution of records for traceability. Furthermore, the CCL process continuity is becoming critical from the handover point at Malaysia point of receipt from the manufacturer and further distribution from central storage to the two hundred vaccination center across the country. Key concerns will be the vaccines’ CCL process for remote areas in Malaysia. This paper will describe the architecture required to integrate IoT and Blockchain into the CCL management system to monitor the temperature of insulated container or cooler box. While this project may not be able to cover all the parameters it will serve an indication of the required system engineering consideration for the IoT and Blockchain application for the vaccine CCL management

Enabling Sustainable Freight Air Transport in the Adriatic Region through Development of ICT Platform

Freight transport in the Adriatic area suffers from persistent organizational, operational and service barriers and the negative impacts of road transport. Multimodal interventions could reduce CO2 emissions and other impacts, including air and noise pollution, and road congestion. Integrated sustainable solutions can act to improve traffic flow and logistics, and management of goods and tourism supply. Multimodal optimization of road-sea combined transport can be augmented to include air modal share on existing and new routes for sensitive freight with emphasis on yearlong operations. This paper adresses the need to improve and extend the availability of passenger routes to allow the potential for mixed cargo in the Adriatic with a case study in Italy-Greece transport. Such plans are hampered by the overlong (up to 15 hours) duration of air trips, which could reduce product quality within a few hours after harvest. Fast shipment and delivery of affordable fresh products, such as mozzarella and strawberries is essential, and would benefit from nonused passenger cargo. Fresh products could use available hold space, guaranteeing lower-than-conventional shipping time at affordable price. The new service would establish new shipping options for fresh products, empowering Italian and Greek local producers. The service will be enabled through an integrated ICT platform that was developed to offer user access (e.g. to information on departure time, load space availability, goods allowed for transportation), and facilitate creation of new market opportunities for fresh producers. The platform supports the identification of demand and supply (by creating accounts as seller or buyer) and the booking of transport. The platform end user (seller or buyer) can find the proper passenger carrier for shipping fresh products to the airport of origin. Platform design includes Operational (OR) and NonOperational (NOR) requirements. For assuring traceability and location information, static and dynamic RFID tags and portable RFID readers, as well as GPS devices and/or tracking smartphones and supporting infrastructure were included

Data Collection in Two-Tier IoT Networks with Radio Frequency (RF) Energy Harvesting Devices and Tags

The Internet of things (IoT) is expected to connect physical objects and end-users using technologies such as wireless sensor networks and radio frequency identification (RFID). In addition, it will employ a wireless multi-hop backhaul to transfer data collected by a myriad of devices to users or applications such as digital twins operating in a Metaverse. A critical issue is that the number of packets collected and transferred to the Internet is bounded by limited network resources such as bandwidth and energy. In this respect, IoT networks have adopted technologies such as time division multiple access (TDMA), signal interference cancellation (SIC) and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) in order to increase network capacity. Another fundamental issue is energy. To this end, researchers have exploited radio frequency (RF) energy-harvesting technologies to prolong the lifetime of energy constrained sensors and smart devices. Specifically, devices with RF energy harvesting capabilities can rely on ambient RF sources such as access points, television towers, and base stations. Further, an operator may deploy dedicated power beacons that serve as RF-energy sources. Apart from that, in order to reduce energy consumption, devices can adopt ambient backscattering communication technologies. Advantageously, backscattering allows devices to communicate using negligible amount of energy by modulating ambient RF signals. To address the aforementioned issues, this thesis first considers data collection in a two-tier MIMO ambient RF energy-harvesting network. The first tier consists of routers with MIMO capability and a set of source-destination pairs/flows. The second tier consists of energy harvesting devices that rely on RF transmissions from routers for energy supply. The problem is to determine a minimum-length TDMA link schedule that satisfies the traffic demand of source-destination pairs and energy demand of energy harvesting devices. It formulates the problem as a linear program (LP), and outlines a heuristic to construct transmission sets that are then used by the said LP. In addition, it outlines a new routing metric that considers the energy demand of energy harvesting devices to cope with routing requirements of IoT networks. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm on average achieves 31.25% shorter schedules as compared to competing schemes. In addition, the said routing metric results in link schedules that are at most 24.75% longer than those computed by the LP

Numerical study on aerodynamic noise performances of axial spacing in a contra-rotating axial fan

In order to study the effect of axial spacing on behaviors of aerodynamic performance and aerodynamic noises in a contra-rotating fan, the steady/unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations are solved by the numerical method in conjunction with a SST turbulence model, and the effects of axial spacing on performance and aerodynamic characteristics are investigated. Furthermore, BEM is adopted to compute the radiation noise of the contra-rotating fan caused by unsteady pressure fluctuations. The results show that axial spacing is an important factor which can affect the aerodynamic performance of contra-rotating fan. As a whole, the effect of axial spacing on the blade loading of Rotor 2 is significantly greater than that of Rotor 1. For Rotor 2, the smaller axial spacing leads to the large secondary flow loss, and the larger axial spacing leads to the strong mixing loss. With the increase of axial spacing, the radiation noise at the characteristic frequency decreases, but showed different changing degrees. With consideration of the aerodynamic performance and aerodynamic noises of the contra-rotating fan, the optimal comprehensive performance appears at the axial spacing of 0.5 chord