Renzo Akkerman

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Verified

Renzo verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Wageningen University & Research

The management of food distribution networks is receiving more and more attention, both in practice and in the scientific literature. In this paper, we review quantitative operations management approaches to food distribution management, and relate this to challenges faced by the industry. Here, our main focus is on three aspects: food quality, foo...

One of the most challenging tasks in today's food industry is controlling the product quality throughout the food supply chain. In this paper, we integrate food quality in decision-making on production and distribution in a food supply chain. We provide a methodology to model food quality degradation in such a way that it can be integrated in a mix...

The duration of logistics operations, as well as the environmental conditions during these operations, significantly impact the performance of a logistics network for fresh agricultural products. When durations or temperatures increase, product quality decreases and more effort is required to deliver products in time and with the right quality. Dif...

Food banks redistribute food donations that would otherwise be lost for consumption by humans to people in need. As such, food banks play an important role both in addressing food insecurity for people at risk of poverty or social exclusion and in the prevention of food waste and its related environmental impacts. The efficient and effective manage...

The growth of omni-channel retailing resulted in many new challenges for retailers, especially in relation to the replenishment and allocation of inventories for the different channels. In this paper we consider a brick-and-mortar store that uses its inventory to fulfil both in-store demand as well as online orders. In addition to deciding on reple...

The circular economy (CE) is heralded as reducing material use and emissions while providing more jobs and growth. We explored this narrative in a series of expert workshops, basing ourselves on theories, methods and findings from science fields such as global environmental input-output analysis, business modelling, industrial organisation, innovat...

This chapter discusses supply chain management responses used by companies in the food supply chain during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. The chapter first discusses the relevant literature on supply chain resilience. The chapter subsequently reviews supply chain responses in relation to different supply chain resilience capabilities, and then discu...

Agri-food supply chains (AFSCs) are complex, interconnected networks that span the world, yet they are highly influenced by regional contexts, as the chapters from this book have illustrated. From large-scale farming in countries like the United States to small and medium-sized farmers in Latin America and Africa, each region presents its own set o...

Agri-food supply chains have unique characteristics and challenges for which we need an appropriate analytical framework. In addressing these issues, we first discuss agri-food supply chain characteristics, after which we provide a framework for designing agri-food supply chains. The chapter also provides a quick overview of the structure of the re...

Considering that food supply chains are a major part of many discussions about sustainability, it is worrying that a lot of the food that is produced does not actually make it to consumption. This means that related environmental impacts were made in vain, while at the same time food insecurity is a main problem in many parts of the world. In this...

This study focuses on the post-harvest preprocessing of fruits and vegetables, aiming to provide an effective way to conduct preprocessing operations in short food supply chains. We consider both a heterogeneous fleet of mobile preprocessing units and the possibility to pick up products for centralized preprocessing. The resulting problem is a vari...

A cross-docking terminal enables consolidating and sorting fast-moving products along supply chain networks and reduces warehousing costs and transportation efforts. The target efficiency of such logistic systems results from synchronizing the physical and information flows while scheduling receiving, shipping and handling operations. Within the ti...

More brick-and-mortar retailers open an online channel to increase sales. Often, they use the store to fulfil online orders and to receive returned products. The uncertain product returns however complicate the replenishment decision of a retailer. The inventory also has to be rationed over the offline and online sales channels. We therefore integr...

When demands exceed capacities, suppliers allocate available supply to customers based on customer importance and advance demand information. The accuracy of advance demand information interacts with the length of customer order lead times and influences overall customer service levels. In this paper, we analyse industrial contract portfolios with...

Product design and supply chain design are two key determinants of company competitiveness. However, they follow different design objectives and thus require a systematic trade-off. Although methodologies for product design and supply chain design are well established within each domain in research and industry, an integrated methodology that bridg...

There is an increase in initiatives towards more localised food systems, consisting of less complex and shorter supply chains. The expectations are that such food systems reduce carbon emissions and food losses and waste, as well as contribute to healthier diets. It is however not clear to what extent these expectations can be met. This paper aims...

Sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) is continuously gaining importance. It has been studied widely in developed countries and to some extent also in developing countries. This paper contributes to the latter by studying environmentally related SSCM practices in Jordanian manufacturing firms and provides a base for policy- and decision-makers...

Timing the introduction of new products to the market is an important strategic decision in the automotive industry. For several reasons, it is also a complex decision problem. First, the use of platforms creates many interactions between different vehicles via shared modules (e.g. engines). Second, new and existing products rely on various shared...

This paper develops a multi-objective modeling approach for the scheduling of harvesting resources in the Thai sugar industry, in which different objectives stemming from different industry stakeholders are concurrently optimized with the overall goal to create a more sustainable sugar supply chain. In addition to traditional economic objectives, t...

This paper addresses a multi-objective sugarcane harvesting problem in Thailand, where several conflicting objectives and local restrictions are regarded as major obstacles to a sustainable sugar production environment. A multi-objective modeling approach that balances three different objectives of different key supply chain actors, namely (i) maxi...

Circular economy (CE) is a concept that has gained considerable attention in recent years, particularly in the domain of Industrial Ecology. CE requires products to be easily repaired, refurbished, remanufactured, and eventually recycled. The transition to a CE creates distinct material flows that have to be managed in an efficient and sustainable...

In the food industry, a wide range of consumer products is produced by blending together intermediate products. These intermediates are often purified extracts from agro-materials. The purification processes guarantee a standard quality and broad applicability, but are resource intensive and lead to the production of low-value byproducts. Non-conve...

We propose a data-driven allocation planning approach, which is designed for use in advanced planning systems as they are widely used in industrial environments. The approach exploits increasingly available data on individual customers and products by allocating supply on a highly granular level at high planning frequencies. It counteracts rationin...

This paper addresses the Resilient Food Supply Chain Design (RFSCD) problem, which is the problem of designing a food supply chain that is resilient enough to ensure business operations continuity in the event of risks or disruptions. Based on a graph theory representation of the food supply chain, this paper proposes a bi-objective mixed-integer p...

Dutch report describing the main challenges companies face in terms of logistics in a circular economy.

Technological developments have propelled the deployability of robots in many applications and have manifested the trend to integrate an increasing number of uncertain processes into robotic and automated equipment. We contribute to this domain by considering the scheduling of a dual-gripper robotic cell. For systems with one potential bottleneck,...

Efficient water management is becoming increasingly important in production systems, but companies often do not have any concrete strategies to implement. While there are numerous technological options for improving water efficiency in process plants, there is a lack of effective decision support to integrate water aspects in operational decision m...

Reuse and regeneration of water is becoming increasingly important in the food industry. Planning both water reuse and production while at the same time ensuring food safety is a challenge. We propose a novel scheduling methodology to simultaneously plan water reuse and production in food production processes utilizing real time water quality data....

Mixed consumers products, such as cosmetics and foods, normally consist of a mixture of intermediates. Most of these intermediates are currently produced by fractionation, a rather complex process where multiple intermediates are obtained from a single raw material, often focused on high purity. These intermediates can subsequently be combined to s...

The food industry is confronted with a pressure to reduce waste and to make agreements on donating surplus food to charitable organizations. Charitable organizations such as food banks and soup kitchens can use these donations in preparing food parcels or meals for their clients. For soup kitchens, donation management is strongly influencing menu p...

A strategy supporting the development towards a circular economy is industrial symbiosis (IS). It is a form of collaborative supply chain management aiming to make industry more sustainable and achieve collective benefits based on utilization of waste, by-products, and excess utilities between economically independent industries. Based on an extens...

Efficient water management is increasingly relevant in the food industry. Exploiting water reuse opportunities in planning production activities is a key part of this. We study integrated water management and production planning in cheese production. For this, we develop a water-integrated lot sizing and scheduling approach for multi-stage hybrid f...

Much attention in the lot sizing and scheduling literature has been focused on reducing the number and size of setups. Cleanings, in contrast, remain a key cost driver in large parts of the process industries such as the food and pharmaceutical sectors. Here, quality and safety considerations lead to a diversity of cleaning requirements. A prerequi...

High demand uncertainties, long production lead times, and short product life cycles cause high risks for supply chain planning in the semiconductor industry. These affect all industries producing goods containing semiconductors. We present a robust supply chain planning framework for revenue management that consists of stable and flexible solution...

In this paper, we discuss the development of decision support systems for hierarchically structured planning approaches, such as commercially available advanced planning systems. We develop a framework to show how such a decision support system can be designed with the existing organization in mind, and how a decision process and corresponding soft...

This paper presents a hierarchical demand-driven planning framework for the fast-moving consumer goods industry. We develop a planning methodology that is more adaptive to changing customer demand than the typical pull-based planning methods while it reduces inventories compared to the typical push-based planning methods. In an industry where forec...

This paper addresses procurement planning in oil refining, which has until now only had limited attention in the literature. We introduce a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model and develop a novel two-stage solution approach, which aims at computational efficiency while addressing the problems due to discrepancies between a non-linear...

The foodservice sector is associated with a limited possibility of storing foods due to shelf life restrictions, a labour-intensive production environment with various skill requirements, low profit margins, and an extensive set of regulations and expectations regarding the quality of meal provision. Inspired by a municipal foodservice case in Denm...

Safety in the food industry is gaining more and more importance every passing day. In recent years, several outbreaks of Salmonella have occurred in chocolate products. Traceability and HACCP system are important instruments for the food safety management. Traceability is useful to properly and efficiently handle a recall, but by itself it has no e...

Due to recent developments in traceability systems, it is now possible to exchange significant amounts of data through food supply chains. Farming practices applied by cocoa farmers at the beginning of the chocolate supply chain strongly influence several quality parameters of the finished chocolate. However, information regarding these practices d...

This study addresses a capacitated intermediate product selection and blending problem typical for two-stage production systems in the food processing industry. The problem involves the selection of a set of intermediates and end-product recipes characterising how those selected intermediates are blended into end products to minimise the total oper...

Purpose – Stock keeping unit (SKU) classifications are widely used in the field of production and operations management. Although many theoretical and practical examples of classifications exist, there are no overviews of the current literature, and general guidelines are lacking with respect to method selection for classifying SKUs. The purpose of...

The primary aim of food traceability is to increase food safety, but traceability systems can also bring other benefits to production systems and supply chains. In the literature these benefits are extensively discussed, but studies that quantify them are scarce. In this paper we propose two hypothetical improvements of the traceability system with...

In contrast to discrete manufacturers, food-processing companies can sometimes produce the same end products in different ways: either mix first and then process, or process first and mix later. Moreover, a final product can be mixed from different raw materials or intermediates. That adds a new dimension to postponement and decoupling point theory...

Changing customer requirements, unpredictable disturbances combined with expensive production facilities, are major problems for food processing companies to achieve synergy between the economic and environmental performance. There is notably a lack of tools to support decisions to explore effects on performance related to new product introductions...

In the food industry products are usually characterized by their recipes, which are specified by various quality attributes. For end products, this is given by customer requirements, but for intermediate products, the recipes can be chosen in such a way that raw material procurement costs and processing costs are minimized. However, this product se...

In food processing, market demands are increasingly important, resulting in regular introductions of new products, or special offers. Often, such an introduction or promotional effort affects demand of other products or packaging types. Here we study the effect of such correlated demand. More specifically, the aim of this paper is to study the effe...

Production scheduling has been widely studied in several research areas, resulting in a large number of methods, prescriptions, and approaches. However, the impact on scheduling practice seems relatively low. This is also the case in the food-processing industry, where industry-specific characteristics induce specific and complex scheduling problem...

This paper studies the production and distribution system for professionally prepared meals, in which a new innovative concept is applied. The concept aims to improve the sustainability of the system by distributing meal elements super-chilled in the conventional cold chain. Here, sustainability comprises economic, environmental and social aspects....

After a number of food safety crises, the design and implementation of traceability systems became an important focus of the food industry. As a result, food product traceability ranks high on senior management agendas for supply chain activities. In the literature, numerous studies deal with traceability from the viewpoint of information system an...

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to investigate the limitations and barriers for supply chain integration that food manufacturers experience and to highlight their planning and scheduling problems. Possible ways to cope with these are offered. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is theoretical/conceptual in nature: the findings are illust...

In food-processing industries, reduction of product losses is important for improving profitability and sustainability. This paper presents a decision support tool for analyzing the effects of planning decisions on the amount of product losses in the food-processing industry. We created a research framework to collect and analyze data, supporting t...

The food industry has a variety of distinct characteristics that make effective supply chain management a difficult task. One of the most important characteristics to consider is the perishable nature of food products. It relates to important issues like food safety, health and nutrition, and poses significant challenges in food supply chain manage...

In food processing, two-stage production systems with a batch processor in the first stage and packaging lines in the second stage are common and mostly separated by capacity- and time-constrained intermediate storage. This combination of constraints is common in practice, but the literature hardly pays any attention to this. In this paper, we show...

In the food-processing industry, usually a limited number of storage tanks for intermediate storage is available, which are used for different products. The market sometimes requires extremely short lead times for some products, leading to prioritization of these products, partly through the dedication of a storage tank. This type of situation has...

Proefschrift Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. Met lit.opg. - Met samenvatting in het Nederlands.

Waiting times for cardiac surgery is a significant problem in the medical world. The fact that patients' length of stay varies considerably makes effective hospital operation a difficult job. This paper analyzes patients' length of stay in hospital wards following cardiac surgery. Three scenarios for hospital management are presented and evaluated...