Experimental analysis of shelf life based inventory management policies for RIFD enabled supply chains

Abstract

Post harvest losses depend on inefficiencies of supply chains and distribution networks for perishable products. In such context the replacement of FIFO picking rule with shelf-life based policies has been proven to improve the overall performance of the supply chain. The practicability of such approach is related to possibility of monitoring the deterioration rate of the products and the possibility of predicting the residual shelf-life, that is mainly influenced by the storage conditions throughout the entire cold chain. The mathematical relation between storage temperature and residual shelf life can be found in the Arrehenius’s law. Shelf-life based inventory management policies are seldom employed, generally due to the difficulties in the assessment of the temperature history. Such problem can be overcome by means of RFID technologies. RFID tags can be equipped with a temperature sensor and onboard memory and can be read by contactless devices. In the context of supply chains for perishable products RFID can be the enabling technology that allows the establishment of shelf-life based pricing policies. The present paper reports the technical/economic analysis related to the employment of an RFID warehouse management system in an agro-industrial supply chain, based upon the experimental validation of the theoretical shelf-life model and referred to actual product flows.