EURO 2024 Copenhagen
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3848. Resilient national cold chain deployment for addressing food waste and achieving economic prosperity in the Global South: An agent-based approach

Contributed abstract in session TB-43: Simulation in sustainability, stream Agent-based Models in Management, Economic and Organisation Sciences.

Tuesday, 10:30-12:00
Room: 99 (building: 306)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Adam Gripton
School of Social Sciences, Heriot-Watt University
2. Aghdas Badiee
Edinburgh business school, Heriot-watt University
3. Phil Greening
Heriott-watt

Abstract

Many Global South countries currently suffer from high degrees of agricultural food waste due to the warm climate and lack of an integrated national cold chain supply network. This can lead to many societal issues that hinder growth and development, including poor outcomes for population health and nutrition metrics, a “poverty trap” for smallholder farmers without market options for selling their produce, and for the national economy through lack of cold-chain traceability that would allow access to more lucrative export markets. Design of a national cold-chain network as critical infrastructure requires consideration of a wide range of market forces and behaviours in such a tightly-coupled system, as well as dealing with the inherent uncertainty in such interactions, to ensure that placement and operation of cold staging facilities can be optimally planned to achieve the desired national outcomes for public health and economic wealth. Agent-based modelling (ABM) can assist in capturing these phenomena to allow a future scenario of cold-chain infrastructure deployment to be tested for efficiency and resilience in the face of uncertainty and black-swan events such as extreme weather events caused by climate change. We present preliminary results, applied to Rwanda as a case study, of a bespoke ABM solution designed to show the effects of offering cold chain as an alternative business model to farmers and showing how network placement affects national outcomes.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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