Simulation-Based Order Management for the Animal Feed Industry

Animal feed production constitutes a significant market in today's agricultural sector, with an annual turnover of 55 billion euros within the European Union in 2020. Nevertheless, feed logistics stills suffer from low digitization and manually coordinated supply chains. These factors lead to high transportation and product costs for customers and retailers by inducing short-term orders that often disregard current price developments. This article presents a simulation model for feed supply networks consisting of a number of customers, retailers, and manufacturers. It proposes a fuzzy-based decision strategy for customers to decide when to order specific products. Moreover, it describes a possible decision strategy for retailers to optimize their transport routes by selecting viable manufacturers. The evaluation shows that the proposed decision strategy can reduce costs for feed and, depending on the supply network structure, reduce delivery distances for feed retailers.