The director of the Master of Science in Big Data & Business Analytics at ESCP Europe studied the inventory of perishables with a PhD student and contributed to food preservation by introducing the novel concept of cross-perishability.
« Faced with the challenges related to the sustainable feeding of the growing world population, the food industry increasingly relies on operational research techniques to achieve economic, environmental and social sustainability »explains Professor of Information and Operations Management Wei Zhou in an article on the topic of sustainable food supply chain. He has published several more and even a book on inventory management and RFID-based solutions in supply chains.
In his latest published research, he explored the perishable food inventory system with Huihui Chi, PhD candidate at ESCP Europe, or Tang, professor at Linkoping University, Ya Yang, Qinghai University, and Tijun Fan, professor at East China University of Science and Technology. It is very common for retailers to store and manage several types of perishable goods together. Due to chemical or biological reactions, the shelf life of certain perishable products (vegetables, fruit, fish, meat, etc.) is prolonged or shortened with the joint storage of other types of products. Although this is an important phenomenon, it has not been mentioned in the literature on perishable stocks,’ they explain.
This is why they studied the effect of perishable foods on other perishable foods – which they called cross-perishability -, formulating an inventory model with a new control variable of the conservation effort that, in turn affects the shelf life when several types of products coexist.
