Integrating Deep Learning Demand Forecasting with Multi-Objective Optimization for Circular Coffee Supply Chains: A Data-Driven Framework for Cost, Emissions, and Freshness Management

Supply chain resilience and efficiency are vital in industries characterized by volatile demand and uncertain supply, such as textiles and personal protective equipment (PPE). Traditional forecasting and optimization approaches often operate in isolation, limiting their real-world effectiveness. This paper proposes a Hybrid AI Framework for Demand-Supply Forecasting and Optimization (HAF-DS), which integrates a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)-based demand forecasting module with a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) optimization layer. The LSTM captures temporal and contextual demand dependencies, while the optimization layer prescribes cost-efficient replenishment and allocation decisions. The framework jointly minimizes forecasting error and operational cost through embedding-based feature representation and recurrent neural architectures. Experiments on textile sales and supply chain datasets show significant performance gains over statistical and deep learning baselines. On the combined dataset, HAF-DS reduced Mean Absolute Error (MAE) from 15.04 to 12.83 (14.7%), Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) from 19.53 to 17.11 (12.4%), and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) from 9.5% to 8.1%. Inventory cost decreased by 5.4%, stockouts by 27.5%, and service level rose from 95.5% to 97.8%. These results confirm that coupling predictive forecasting with prescriptive optimization enhances both accuracy and efficiency, providing a scalable and adaptable solution for modern textile and PPE supply chains.

Can supply-chain AI move beyond isolated decision modules toward unified operational planning? A complete replenishment plan specifies which products each location carries, which upstream facility supplies it, how often it is replenished, and how deliveries are routed. These decisions are operationally coupled: the selected assortment changes the demand and load passed to later stages; source assignment and replenishment frequency reshape the delivery requests; and route feasibility and cost, in turn, determine the system value of the earlier choices. Yet in modern supply chains, these decisions are often handled by separate departments and optimized through separate systems, which can lead to stockouts, inventory exposure, and avoidable transportation. We propose SCOPE: Supply-Chain Operations through Coupled Policies for End-to-End Coordination, a composite policy model that represents supply-chain entities as tokens, contextualizes them through a shared operational representation, and maps each token type to the corresponding decision interface. Each decision builds on the partial plan formed by earlier decisions while the completed plan is evaluated using a shared system-level utility. We instantiate this framework in urban fresh-retail replenishment, where service frequency, assortment, capacity pressure, and road-network routing interact strongly, and evaluate it on real operational data from Dingdong and JD.com, two large-scale supply chains operating at different replenishment echelons. Across both settings, SCOPE consistently outperforms methods that optimize each decision stage separately, as well as practice-oriented baselines commonly used in supply-chain operations. These results show that learning and coordinating cross-department operational couplings lead to more effective end-to-end supply-chain decisions.

Fresh fruits and vegetables (FFVs) are highly perishable, and cold-chain breaks contribute significantly to global food waste. While Machine Learning (ML) can enable proactive intervention, cloud-based inference faces challenges such as latency and data loss. Fog computing addresses these issues but has been tested only in simulation for FFV cold-chain temperature prediction. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this paper presents its first real-world deployment. A fog-deployed LSTM-GRU model predicted cold-room temperature using LoRaWAN sensor data collected from a South African apple cold-storage facility with induced cold-chain breaks. Running entirely on a Raspberry Pi 4 with no cloud dependency, the system generated conditional SHAP explanations only when a break is predicted. The deployed system predicts cold-room temperature with an MAE of 0.2°C at roughly 0.2 kWh per day ($\approx 0.7$ Wh per prediction). Predictions were delivered in under one second (555 ms), dominated by network and messaging rather than computation, with conditional explanations adding modest cost. SHAP consumes 28% more CPU but is well within the hardware's capacity. The model attributes its predictions primarily to temperature, humidity, and their interaction. Critically, the deployment surfaced what simulation cannot: a sensor-triggered single point of failure, alongside genuine resilience, autonomous recovery from infrastructure faults and continued operation through internet loss. These are the first published deployment benchmarks for fog-based temperature prediction in FFV cold chains, establishing that explainable temperature forecasting is feasible on resource-constrained edge hardware. Future work includes asynchronous sensor fusion, commercial cold chain deployment, alternative model architectures, and causal analysis.