8. Conclusions and future work
Currently, the perishable food industry need to establish an efficient and quick-respond supply chain with low cost to meet the challenge of keeping the perishable food fresh even in cross-regional cases. A conceptual model was established for the perishable food supply chain with 2ESH. In order to realize the real-time information sharing among different roles in a supply chain, an easy-to-deploy and simple-to-use architecture for SCPF is developed by applying the IoT technologies. In our research, the IoT-enabled SCPF has two supply hubs which dominate the operations in the supply chain. The two hubs respond to their nearby nodes of the supply chain. They can provide public warehousing and logistic services, and can also be used for online operational monitoring and emergency treatment. The performance of supply chain has improved when implementing the proposed model, as is demonstrated by the case study.
There are four main contributions presented in this work. First, an overall architecture of IoT is constructed to achieve the information sharing within the supply chain. The architecture can act as a reference model when applying IoT in such industries. Second, the model of perishable food supply chain with two supply hubs is designed to optimize the performance of SCPF. Third, the real-time information-sharing mechanism redefines the ways to select processors in SCPF-2ESH, since the information asymmetry between different roles in the supply chain is turned into information symmetry under the IoT environment. A processors satisfaction-based processor selection model is also proposed to allocate orders. Finally, a representational case is shown to demonstrate the workflow of SCPF after applying this model.
The future work will mainly focus on the extension of self-organizing and online dynamic scheduling in cloud platform, so that the proposed model will be more robust and reliable under complex situations.
