The rapid advancement of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) technologies has revolutionized various industries, including the cold supply chain (CSC) sector. When it comes to preserving the quality and integrity of temperature-sensitive goods, such as perishable food items and medications, CSC plays an important role. Despite this, traditional CSC management methods often lack real-time visibility, leading to inefficiencies, higher costs, and potential product spoilage. The current study aims to eliminate inefficiencies and bottlenecks in the traditional CSC management system and to improve cold supply chain performance (CSCP) by leveraging I4.0 technologies across all stages. The study proposed the ten most significant assessment criteria to evaluate the potential of I4.0 technologies to improve CSCP. Furthermore, the study presents a new I4.0-based assessment model that captures the mutual interactions among the assessment criteria and I4.0 technologies, especially tailored for CSCP improvement. The quantitative analysis of the developed model has been conducted using an integrative methodology comprising the Interval-Valued Neutrosophic-based Analytical Hierarchy Process (IVN-AHP) and the Combinative Distance-based Assessment (IVN-CODAS) methods. Sensitivity and comparative analyses have been conducted to assess robustness and validate the results obtained from the proposed methodology.
Kumar et al. (Thu,) studied this question.