An Investment Evaluation of a RFID-Enabled Meat Supply Chain: A Multi-Criteria Approach

In recent years, consumers have become increasingly concerned about the safety and quality of meat they purchase from supermarkets. A study by Mohammed [1] proposed a RFID (Radio Frequency Identification)-enabled monitoring system for meat supply chains to improve the traceability of meat products throughout their entire supply chain with the aim of maintaining product safety. This paper extends that work to examine the economic feasibility for the proposed RFID-enabled monitoring system. To this aim, a multi-criteria optimization model was developed. The considered criteria were minimizing the total cost, maximizing consumer satisfaction, maximizing product freshness and maximizing profits. In order to obtain Pareto solutions from the developed model, a new solution approach was developed and its results were compared to two traditional solution approaches. A case study was applied conducive to an examination for the applicability of the developed model and the performance of the proposed solution approaches. Results have proved the feasibility of the proposed RFID-enabled monitoring system in terms of economic costs in addition to the capability of the developed optimization model in obtaining a trade-off among the considered criteria.