Contamination control in food supply chain

In this paper, we study a contamination control problem in food supply chain. We formulate the problem as a dynamic programming problem and then study the structure of the optimal control which turns out to be very similar to the hedging-point type of policy. Under the environment in which there is uncertainty associated with contamination control, we propose a stochastic dynamic programming formulation with chance constraints, to which simulation based methods could be applied. ©2010 IEEE.