Research On Cold Chain Considering Carbon Emission

With the improvement of living standard, consumers'requirements of food safety and quality have been increasing, thus this contributes to the development of cold chain logistics. In order to understand the current situation of cold chain in China, the thesis analyzes the cold chain market through a market research firstly. It finds that cold chain has big market space and has entered a period of rapid development. And about 70% consumers are willing to pay a premium of 10%-20% for cold chain to ensure food safety and quality.While the cold chain can improve food safety and freshness, temperature control needs extra energy which contradicts the theme of"low carbon"in the world today. As one of the businesses which have the highest energy consumption and carbon emission in logistics industry, it is very worth studying the question of how to make cold chain adapt to low carbon economy.In the thesis, life cycle assessment method is used at first to calculate the carbon emission factors. Then, a cold chain inventory model considering the carbon emission factors is established and the optimal inventory policy with the objective of low carbon can be derived. The model is verified with a numerical example and parameters including price of carbon emission, product's deterioration rate, and carbon emission factors, etc. are discussed.Finally, through a simulation and optimization, multi-stage cold-chain with low-carbon objective has been studied. It compares the changes before and after considering the cost of carbon emission in the thesis and also analyzes the impact on the optimal policies of the supply chain.