Applied Sciences, Vol. 13, Pages 7897: Estimation of the Network Reliability for a Stochastic Cold Chain Network with Multi-State Travel Time

Applied Sciences, Vol. 13, Pages 7897: Estimation of the Network Reliability for a Stochastic Cold Chain Network with Multi-State Travel Time

Applied Sciences doi: 10.3390/app13137897

Authors: Thi-Phuong Nguyen Chin-Lung Huang Yi-Kuei Lin

A stochastic cold chain (SCC) is a common supply chain in real life that emphasizes the need for commodities to arrive fresh within time constraints. In previous research on supply chains, the time factor was regarded as a fixed number. However, the travel time is a stochastic factor due to traffic and weather conditions during the delivery. Therefore, this paper concentrates on the two multi-state factors simultaneously. Network reliability is one of the performance indexes used to assess the cold chain efficacy, defined as the probability that the flow of SCC can satisfy the demand within the delivery time threshold. The SCC with two multi-state factors is modeled as a stochastic cold chain network with multi-state travel time (SCCNMT). To calculate the network reliability of an SCCNMT, we will calculate the demand reliability and time reliability separately, treating them as independent events, and multiply the demand and time reliability to estimate the network reliability of the two multi-state factors.