Close-loop Land-network Modelling for Sustainable Food Supply Chain

Global supply chains make products travelling from vendors to final consumers around the world, being available almost in every place and at every time. Food products are shipped all over the world for their taste, and the particular environment where they grow. Unfortunately, the rate at which the world population and related food demand increases, are altering the agriculture processes (i.e. seeding, harvesting, farming, etc.) from traditional techniques towards intensive methodologies and patterns, aimed to boost lands and crops yield. Such routines lead to the fulfilment of the food exportation demand towards rich western countries, at the expense of the exploitation of natural resources suffered by vendor countries, unsustainable in the long terms. In order to plan and design a global food supply chain, considerations on the lands yield, the climatic conditions, the soil features and characteristics, the available natural energy sources, aimed to the management of land use over economic and environmental perspectives, are necessary. Furthermore, the management of food supply chains entails the collection of commodities, the manufacturing, the distribution and storage network, and the end-of-life cycles, and significantly improves the quality, the efficiency, and the sustainability of the overall systems. The goal of this paper is joining both sides of the coin, the agriculture and logistics concerns over a new land-network perspective for the design and management of a sustainable food chain, presenting and illustrating an original integrated perspective to handle food chain issues. Such criticalities are addressed through a top-down analysis methodology based on a set of mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) models to achieve the economical and environmental sustainability of the overall close-loop FSC.