ISE students won Third Class Award in SF-X Food Supply Chain Solution Innovation Competition

The SF-X Food Supply Chain Solution Innovation Competition (SF-X食品供應鏈解決方案創新大賽) is co-organized by the Operations Research Institute of Jiangsu Province, Jiangnan University, and SF Express Wuxi on 28 September 2024. It aims to apply operations research and logistics optimization techniques to real-world food supply chain challenges.

With a focus on efficiency, sustainability, and innovation, the competition encourages participants to develop practical solutions to important industry problems. Under the supervision of Prof. Windy Wen (Assistant Professor of ISE), LEM students, Ms. MAO Jianing and Mr. LAM Ka Chun, together with Research Assistant Mr. HUANG Xinyu, formed a team to participate in this competition and won the third prize (三等獎) out of 29 participating teams.

The problem addressed by the team focuses on the optimisation of the fresh food supply chain using multimodal transport. Given a supply chain network that includes production plants, warehouses, airports, and customers, the team has developed a novel mathematical model that accounts for transportation costs, storage costs, lead time, and shelf-life penalties. A variety of efficient solution algorithms (including exact and heuristic algorithms) have been developed to efficiently solve real-world sized problems, showing great potential to achieve cost savings and improvements in customer satisfaction for the logistics industry.