Perishables

Book chapter, 2023

Perishable goods such as fruits and vegetables require timely and accurate handling routines to ensure a high degree of product quality across all stages of the supply chain. Consequently, they constitute a fundamental business factor for organizations that needs to be managed in a delicate and prudent fashion. The perishability of products characterizes a challenging environment that requires dynamic planning and evaluation approaches to avoid or countervail the negative energetic impacts of inefficient operations. By providing a sophisticated conceptualization of the given system and its dynamic evolution over time, computer simulation serves as viable tool for analyzing and optimizing energy-related aspects of production and logistics systems for perishable items. This chapter reviews the current state of research for simulating energy-related aspects of perishable products and highlights common energy performance indicators such as food waste, emissions, and temperature. To outline contextual interdependencies and provide practical insights into the use of simulation to assess energy aspects of perishables, three use cases are presented. These cases elaborate on the energetic implication of a juice production plant in Sweden, the estimation of food quality losses in regional strawberry supply chains in Austria, and the energy and media consumption of a beverage bottling plant in Germany.