New opportunities in operations research to improve pork supply chain efficiency

The structure of the pork sector in world economy is changing. In many countries the number of pig farms is being reduced, while the herd size of the remaining ones is increasing. Pig production process is partitioned into different phases with specialized farms devoted to piglet production, rearing or fattening pigs are common instead of old farrowing-to-fattening farms. Pig farms have tended to be integrated and coordinate their operations into pork supply chains by using tighter vertical coordination linkages. This paper presents a description of the pork supply chain, stressing the role of pig farming as one of the key issues to improve pork supply chain efficiency. A survey of literature to support the decision making on the pork sector has revealed that most papers had only considered individual farm operations, while the pork supply chain management involves the coordination of sets of farm units at different stages of production. Thus, our contribution emphasizes the importance and complexity of new decision-making tasks regarding the modern organization of the pork sector. All these elements make it possible to envisage new opportunities for operations research methods to be successfully applied to the pork supply chain. Likewise, we have identified some existing gaps in the literature that we believe should be addressed in the near future.