Mapping and Simulation for planning Mediterranean agro-food supply channels: Results from FUTUREMED Project

Recent reports on the food European industry overview an extremely fractioned and ineffective sector, where the lack of integration throughout the food supply chain provides diseconomies, food losses and waste, transactional costs, and constraints the chances for a sustainable growth of the whole sector. This paper reports the main outcomes from the FUTUREMED project, whose aim is to address the lack of integrated frameworks able to go beyond the physical and transactional barriers between supply chain stages and actors, and thereby to support the holistic analysis and assessment of the food supply chain operations as a whole. This paper pretends to provide a comprehensive framework for food supply chain mapping and classification, based on a conceptual data architecture and a resulting database for information storage. This framework is implemented into a decision-support tool built upon the database and that includes Geographic Information System (GIS) and simulation techniques for food supply network assessment and design scopes. The data architecture and tool are validated with a company-sourced case study and the obtained savings are illustrated and discussed.