Chilled or frozen? Decision strategies for sustainable food supply chains: A note

Abstract

Zanoni and Zavanella [1] investigate the modelling of transfer batch size and energy effort in a cold chain. Due to the complexity of the objective function, they solve it numerically while considering temperature as a endogenous variable. We consider the same model and simplify the objective function by using Taylor series, and then we obtain the closed-form expression for the transfer batch size. Moreover, we also propose the way to approximate the optimal temperature. Numerical studies show that our approach is effective and efficient.