Establishment of materials batch mixing optimization model for traceability of fresh-cuts fruits and vegetables processing

In order to protect the quality and safety of products of the fresh cut vegetable processing and improve fresh cut vegetable production and processing efficiency, a fresh cut vegetable processing batch mixing optimization model was put forward, which can reduce the recall cost resulted from the mixed batches during the manufacture. The batch-mixing phenomenon of raw materials often occurs during the production process of fresh-cut vegetables. On the other hand, different batches of materials have different properties which will exert some effects on the rate of the production yield. Proper allocation of the materials' batches will reduce the recall cost of defective products. In order to enhance the ability of production efficiency and improve the supervision on the quality and safety for fresh-cut vegetables, an optimized model for this problem should be developed. In this research, after the analysis of the basic process in fresh-cut vegetables manufacture, a model based on the order of the daily manufacture in enterprise and the batch of materials was established, which could reduce the batch-mixing level of the materials and improve the production efficiency. The manufacture process of the fresh-cut vegetables was taken as the core research point, and the experiment parameters were obtained from a cooperative enterprise in Beijing which was a typical manufacture enterprise of fresh-cut vegetables. Unlike other areas of vegetable manufacture, the manufacture of fresh-cut vegetables needed to take the different products and different batches of material processing into account. According to the actual production requirements of small and medium-sized fresh-cut vegetable processing enterprises, the production process, which could be well applicable to the pattern of single material warehouse and single warehouse of finished product, was studied in details. Based on the reality limits, the orders' sequence and the batch of materials should be optimized. The processing of product order and the selection and sorting of raw material batch belong to the NP-Hard problem, and the scale of the problem rapidly increased with the expanding of the order and batch. So it was necessary to adopt intelligent optimization methods to solve the problem. And based on the actual condition in the manufacture enterprises of fresh-cut vegetables, the processing sequence of the manufacture order and the selection sequence of the different batches of materials were optimized using genetic algorithm. The population size was set to 100, two-point crossover rate was set to 0.9, the mutation rate was set to 0.1, the weight of material mixing was set to 0.3, the average yield for the processing was set to 0.7 and the maximum amount of iterations was limited to 50. The objective function consisted of the average recall size and the average yield of product. The model was applied in a manufacture enterprise of fresh-cut fruits and vegetables, and the test results showed that the value of the objective function was improved by 10.5%, which could reduce the average recall rate and improve the production efficiency. This model can provide suggestion of material batch distribution and optimization of production for the small and medium-sized fresh-cut vegetable processing enterprises.