Exploring industry-wise cold chain risk factors using LDA modelling

Abstract

The cold chain is essential for ensuring the safety and quality of products for consumers. In addition, the cold chain is time-sensitive, intricate, and devoted. The majority of cold chain products are perishable and challenging to preserve. Therefore, it is essential to identify the risk factors in the cold chain to ensure the stable operation of the cold chain. In prior research on cold chains, most studies only identified risk factors for a single type of industry’s cold chain, and comparative research between cold chain industries is scarce. As a result, this study focuses on the fresh food cold chain and the medicine cold chain, investigates the risk factors associated with these two types of cold chain, and compares the risk factors. Fresh food and medicine are essential to human life and strongly correlate with life quality. In the cold chain, fresh food and medicine have the highest proportion of personal consumption, and the market is rapidly expanding. This study summarized the cold chain risk factors into seven categories by analyzing the cold chain operation process and prior research. A web crawler technique was used to obtain news about cold chain risks on Google News. LDA topic modelling is the most prevalent technique in text-based data clustering analysis. It provides a probability distribution for the topics of each document in the document set and then permits topic clustering or text classification based on the topics. Consequently, LDA topic modelling can identify latent topic information in large document sets or corpora. Using LDA topic modelling to extract risk factors from online news texts, we can identify risk factors from a more granular perspective by capitalizing on the online news’ timeliness, authenticity, accuracy, and objectivity and overcoming the limitations of survey questionnaire research. In addition, the calculation of the importance of each topic based on the probability of word frequency can yield the relative weight of each risk factor, thereby enhancing the significance of the risk factors investigated in this study. The risk factors for the fresh food cold chain and the medicine cold chain are then compared and analyzed. The results of the comparative analysis, show that environmental risk and information management risk are significant risk factors in both the fresh cold chain and the medicine cold chain. Demand risk is predominant in the fresh food cold chain, whereas supply risk is predominant in the medicine cold chain. Furthermore, transportation and storage risks are more prevalent in the cold chain for medicines. Finally, the study’s propose coping strategies for cold chain risks.