Plant Location Selection for Food Production

Conclusion

This study proposed a plant location selection procedure by simulating the daily production volume and considering the supply failures of food raw materials. This process mainly consisted of quantifying the supply vulnerability of raw materials and incorporating the quantified vulnerability scores into the stochastic simulation. We proposed the three vulnerability factors: raw material availability, production efficiency of raw materials, and possibility of replacing raw material feedstock using alternative sources, in order to quantify the regional and seasonal supply vulnerability of raw materials. These factors were then incorporated into fuzzy quantification to estimate supply vulnerability scores. The estimated supply failure information included the time gaps between failures and the duration of each failure. This information was used to determine the adjusted daily utilization and the production volume of a prospective food production plant.

The proposed simulation model will be useful for decision makers to ordinally rank plant location candidates by relative comparison of simulated production volumes. However, it is not recommended to consider the estimated production volume as a cardinal performance measure of a candidate location due to the approximated supply failure distributions with the given imprecise information. In other words, the proposed fuzzy vulnerability quantification and supply failure estimation methods enable simulation-based decision making even if supply failure data are not enough to estimate a probability density function using a conventional distribution fitting method.

The findings of this study can be applied and extended for two purposes: (1) to allow practitioners to effectively rank the prospective locations during the decision-making process and (2) to forecast the daily production volume of a plant in a particular location, given enough historical data, which is essential for detailed layout planning.