Improving the Reliability and Security of Global Cold Chain Logistics
can be replaced, but the cascading delays
can cause irreversible damage to patients
and severe loses in utilization of medical
personnel, equipment and facilities.
whenever possible to meet green standards
needed to be ethical participants in
sustainable supply chains.
S UGGESTED I MPROVEMENTS TO
G LOBAL C OLD C HAINS
Diminished or Unknown Efficacy
Assets managed via a cold chain may either
be completely unusable after sustaining
damage or the asset may have some
alternate usefulness. For many vaccines,
excessive heat reduces the efficacy but does
not destroy them completely. The damaged
vaccines can still be administered to patients
within certain age ranges and yield expected
efficacy for those patients. However, the
same damaged vaccines would not be
effective if administered to patients outside
of this age range.
While the maintenance of a global cold chain
is challenging, new technologies afford ways
to improve the reliability and immediacy of
monitoring goods. Additionally, distributed
ledgers allow for increased trust by all
participants in the cold chain. Combining
immediacy and trustworthiness opens new
possibilities for how we can improve the
reliability of cold chains while reducing risks
and costs.
Trusted Handoff Spaces
The ability of IoT to provide more granular
monitoring provides more resilience to the
cold chain by identifying the lots or
individual assets that have been minorly
damaged yet can still continue within the
cold chain to deliver expected results
without compromising other assets or
patients.
Varied lot sizes, transport modalities and
regionalized data laws makes it unlikely that
we will ever be able to have a single,
standard way to move goods. As such, there
will be a continued need to hand off a
shipment from one party to another. During
this handoff, we should provide redundant
environmental isolation, such as a
refrigerated crate being transferred within a
refrigerated loading dock. These double-
sealed locations can be designated as
trusted places to take actions that would
otherwise be deemed a breaking of the cold
chain. For example, a tamper-resistant seal
on a container owned by one party might
need to be broken to shift goods to another
container. Additional documentation and
Energy Consumption
The energy costs for maintaining a cold chain
can be significant. 11 Without detailed
sensing and asset tracking, the participants
in the cold chain will either have to use far
more energy than is necessary, or they will
be taking on unacceptable risk for spoilage.
The survival of assets is paramount, but we
must also strive for reducing energy usage
11
Chen, S. and Lan, H. (2016). The cold chain logistics enterprise's green level evaluation. 2016 International Conference on
Logistics, Informatics and Service Sciences (LISS).
IIC Journal of Innovation
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