Modelling and simulation of indian traditional agriculture supply chain to retain freshness and reduce post harvest losses

Abstract

The research concentration on agriculture supply chain has increased tremendously due to the fact that it plays a major role in food safety and security. Generally, agriculture supply chain has many stages like harvesting, storage, transportation, and distribution. Nowadays the developing country like India is focusing on post-harvest stages of their agriculture supply chain to improve. As India is one of the largest agriculture country in the world. In addition, it seeks immediate concentration towards the agriculture supply chain to reduce post-harvest losses. Therefore, Indian agriculture supply chain is required to meet consumer demand and ensure freshness. The post-harvest losses mostly happen in storage, transportation and distributions as India has miniscule storage and logistics structure. As the post-harvest loss is more in Indian agriculture supply chain and it needs to be improved to retaining freshness to reduce the post-harvest losses. In view of that, Indian agriculture supply chain needs novel transportation method to retain the freshness and modified agriculture supply chain. Therefore, modelling and optimization of complex Indian agriculture supply chain begins with identification and grouping of agriculture produces. The agriculture produces are identified based on high consumption of local produces. The list of identified produces used in this research are; beans, eggplant, okra, potato and tomato. These produces were grouped together based on compatibility. Therefore, those identified produces are grouped as group (A) and group (B). The compatible produces like beans, eggplant, and okra are considered as group (A). Likewise, the compatible produces like potato and tomato are considered as group (B). The compatible produces are then transported together in a closed container newline