Effect of pre-emptive operational strategies on product quality and deterioration dynamics

Abstract

The innovative logistics strategy of cross-docking enables the offloading of goods from incoming vehicles at the receiving dock, followed by loading the products into outgoing trucks, eliminating the need for prolonged product storage. The brisk movement of products within the cross-docking strategy has made this an uncompromisable approach for transporting staples, groceries, and perishable items. Although the goal is to maintain a stable environment within the cross-dock centres and vehicles, the loading and unloading process often fails to achieve this. Exposure to an unstable environment affects the quality of goods and initiates their deterioration. The inclusion of the pre-emption technique in the unloading or loading process leads to frequent exposure to an unstable environment, thereby accelerating deterioration. This study explores how pre-emption affects the deterioration rate variation risk coefficient of the products when a limited number of interruptions in the unloading process is considered. A non-linear programming model that considers pre-emption is developed for this problem, and the optimization is performed using an interior-point algorithm to minimize the deterioration rate variation risk coefficient. Results obtain highlight that the inclusion of the pre-emption technique increases the accumulated deterioration rate variation coefficient by nearly 265%, while an increase in the number of product types and their quantities heavily influences the accumulated deterioration rate variation coefficient value, showing a whopping rise of nearly 152%.