Australia-UAE Meat Supply Chain Network Design: An Optimization Approach

Abstract

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) imports over 80% of its food products, of these 9% are meat products, mostly imported from the Australian market (48%) of the total amounting to AUS $205 million. Thus, it is important to map the Australian-UAE Food Supply Chain activities involved and investigate the related logistical cost of food supply chains that contribute to the success of the supply chains. Inventory control is one of the most widely studied areas in the field of operations research and inventory management science. In this thesis, we address classic multi-echelon inventory system. A mathematical programming model was developed to solve real life problems related to one of the popular supply chain configurations, the single warehouse multi-retailers distribution system. The problem focused on one company located in the UAE that imports chilled Australian meat, and stores it in its own warehouse and supplies it to several of its retailers in the UAE. The retailers place orders with the warehouse to satisfy their chilled meet demands. The demand at those retailers is divided into two categories: demand for direct sale to the customer and demand for meat to be cooked and sold by that retailer. The demands are deterministic and occur at a constant rate. Our model will decide the optimal replenishment policy of order quantity and time intervals of all of the facilities in the supply chain from the moment the product arrives to the countries until it reaches the retailers’ shelves. Our objective is find the replenishment policy for each facility on the system that will minimize the long run average cost of ordering and inventory related costs of the overall system, in order to achieve the maximized total profit and identify and critical parameters that affect the decision making process.

Date of Award	2014
Original language	American English
Supervisor	Toufic Mezher (Supervisor)