Agri-food Supply Chain: An Optimisation Approach for Waste Valorisation

Food products of animal or vegetal origin constitute one of the most important business sectors worldwide. Providing appropriate nutrition to a growing world population with ever-increasing dietary habits is a major challenge current practitioners face. To ensure the sector can successfully respond to present and future challenges, the appropriate management of agri-food supply chains (AFSC) is mandatory. This work explores this challenge and proposes a new modelling approach specific to support AFSC design and planning decisions. Our approach uses a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model to design a quantitative model adapted to the context of AFSC, exploring product perishability, technological processing alternatives, different storage capacity strategies, and reverse logistics under an environment where uncertainty in supply and demand exists. The model is applied in a case study, primarily drawn from an existing sugar beet supply chain in the Netherlands. The results show that there is space for better management of AFSC, namely, taking advantage of closed-loop SC principles. Finally, future research directions are highlighted to support further investigation in this field.