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Revenue and inventory management play a crucial role in the operational efficiency of food supply chains. The current study investigates dynamic pricing and inventory control policies in a two-level Food Supply Chain (FSC) of growing and deteriorating inventory that involves a rearing farm as the supplier and a retailer where these slaughtered items are prone to deterioration. The rearing farm breeds newborn animals, then slaughters them and sends the items to the retailer. The negative impact of overbreeding is taken into account to preserve the items' quality and decrease food waste on the supply side. The model is analyzed under decentralized and centralized supply chain scenarios with a profit-sharing contract as the coordination tool in the centralized case. An analytic solution approach based on non-linear convex programming is developed to solve the problem. The developed structure is illustrated through experimental results with a real estimated growth function for broiler chickens. Sensitivity analysis is carried out to investigate the impact of different input parameters. It is shown that the centralized supply chain scenario not only enhances the profit of the supplier and the retailer but also is more desirable for the customers as the selling price of the items decreases in this setting. The results provide decision-makers of each echelon with insights into the features of the studied FSC, including their most influential input parameters, the areas that require further attention, and managerial suggestions under different scenarios. KeywordsInventory control • Dynamic pricing • Food supply chain • Growth • Deterioration IntroductionAbout two-thirds of food wastes occur during the processes of Food Supply Chains (FSCs), which has raised severe criticism against these chains' performance (Zhong et al., 2017). On the other hand, food quality is critical as it directly interfaces with health and safety

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) have been successfully applied in closed environments such as ports and industrial zones, while their operation in open areas has a long way to go. The current research is initiated to overcome this limitation by the introduction of platooning as a transfer mode. It investigates a container transportation problem between a port and an industrial area where the platform facilitates collaborative transportation. Both zones are appropriate for automated driving, whereas their connecting route is not. Different carriers are present at the port, and each transportation task can be done either by a truck or an AV. The platform not only operates as the interface between demand points and carriers but also provides a platooning service to move AVs through non-autonomous roads. It specifies the transportation schedules and service fees based on which the carriers will decide whether to use AVs or trucks for each transportation task. This is modeled as a Stackelberg competition, transformed into a conventional mixedinteger model, and solved to optimality. The approach enables demand and resource pooling between the port and industrial area. Numerical results show that the successful application of AVs highly depends on platoon formation costs and regulations.

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