Smoothing the Transit Centers Operations of Vegetable Supply Chain using Mixed Integer Programming and Simulation Techniques: Sri Lankan Case Study

A well-configured sustainable agri-food supply chain is vital in ensuring food security, supply-demand balance, food accessibility, and affordability to a growing population. A gap in the agri-food supply chain context was emphasized by the literature, which said that configurations aimed at achieving sustainability dimensions were not assessed for their dynamic behavior in terms of efficiency and smooth operational capability with fewer in/out flow bottlenecks. In this study, the Sri Lankan vegetable supply chain has been reconfigured using Stochastic Mixed Integer Linear Programming models with hourly time windows to minimize supply chain cost, emission and waste. The generated optimum solution has been simulated as a discrete event simulation model to evaluate under lead time and transit centre in/outflow. According to the simulation results, the cost-minimizing configuration was found to be efficient and had smooth transit centre operations.