Blockchain technology and mitigating bullwhip effect in supply chains with uncertain markets: a horizontal layer product distribution strategy

Abstract

Product distribution in supply chain management has been hotly debated during the last decade. However, during COVID-19, many supply chains suffered from sudden changes in local market demands. Such changes cause a bullwhip effect throughout a supply chain, making them unable to respond rapidly. This research develops a new model for distributing products in the food chain using real urban and geographical data of blockchain technology. The aim is to re-adjust the product distribution plans by using a horizontal layer product distribution readjustment strategy while local markets confront sudden market changes. To address the problem, a heuristic was proposed and coded by Python based on the largest density-distance rule. Then, to evaluate the performance of the proposed method, the schedules are assessed with some metrics gathered in the literature. For this purpose, a Full Factorial design of experiments is generated by Python. Moreover, the outcomes are compared with those gained from short-traveling time and greedy loading-based heuristics. The results showed that using the horizontal layer product distribution readjustment strategy for modifying the initial schedules could prevent lost sales in all studied cases. Besides, by responding to sudden market demand changes rapidly, which subsequently causes preventing lost sales, more profits were gained in 58.3% of the studied cases. In addition, in 61.11% of studied cases, the proposed method was faster than other studied heuristics in terms of computational time.