An Overview of Warehouse Operations for Cold Chain

Abstract

Warehouses play a significant role in cold chains as they do for regular supply chains. Although their goals are the same for both cold chains and regular supply chains the operations of cold warehouses are more sophisticated since the cost of operation is considerably higher due to energy consumption and obsolesce of products in substandard conditions. Recently there has been an enormous interest in the cold food supply chain to reduce food waste occurring along the chain. Hence efficient management of cold warehouses becomes an important issue in this direction. Design and operation requirements in a cold warehouse may be different from a traditional non-cold warehouse. In this paper we aim to provide an overview of cold chain operations mostly by focusing on cold warehouse operations. We provide some statistics from a cold chain design and technology requirements for cold warehouses as well as warehouse operations shaped according to that warehouse features. It is observed that there are quite different design parameters in cold storage.