Open AccessOptimal transport to cold chain in perishable hand‐picked agriculture
Author(s) -
Manuel Devasia,
Sowers Richard B.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
natural resource modeling
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.28
H-Index - 32
eISSN - 1939-7445
pISSN - 0890-8575
DOI - 10.1111/nrm.12124
Subject(s) - cold chain , agriculture , agricultural engineering , scheduling (production processes) , operations research , quality (philosophy) , mathematical optimization , computer science , operations management , environmental science , economics , mathematics , biology , ecology , engineering , physics , mechanical engineering , quantum mechanics
We develop and analyze a model for scheduling transport for perishable products. Once the harvest is picked, its quality starts to deteriorate, eventually having no value. In hand‐picked crops, the rate of picking often varies during the day. One would like to transport the harvest to a cooling station (cold chain), but to do so according to an optimal policy. This optimal policy should reflect a trade‐off between the loss of quality and the rate of harvest, and the fact that only a finite number of transports can be scheduled. We model the harvest and loss of quality and arrive at a computationally solvable optimization problem.