While industrialized agro-food supply systems have gained tremendous success in recent decades, it has been increasingly criticized for its adverse environmental and social impact. Amongst this criticism, Short Food Supply Chains (SFSCs) have emerged as a promising sustainable alternative to the industrialized agri-food supply systems. In recent years there have been some attempts to explore the relationship between SFSCs and sustainability, but these are mostly theoretical discussions and lacks empirical validation. This study, therefore, attempts to provide empirical validation of the SFSCs and sustainability linkages. Additionally, from the theoretical perspective, our work extends the traditional triple bottom line constructs and explores two extra dimensions of sustainability in the food supply chain system, namely, governance and culture, thus exploring five dimensions of sustainability. Furthermore, while SFSCs have proven to improve farmers’ livelihoods and reconnect producers with consumers, little or no attention has been given to understand the consumers' attitudes towards the SFSC practices. Therefore, this study aims to explore the customers’ attitudes towards participating in SFSCs through the concept of a moral economy and personal relationship. Based on the 532 valid responses from Chinese consumers, our study shows that all five pillars of sustainability, moral economy and Chinese relationship have a positive influence on consumers’ participation in SFSCs. With its intuitive benefits, the economic pillar emerged as the most approved factor by the participants. Interestingly our findings show that the social aspect is less prominent than others, which is contrary to existing studies conducted in developed countries.

This paper proposed an improved bat algorithm based on Lévy flights and adjustment factors (LAFBA). Dynamically decreasing inertia weight is added to the velocity update, which effectively balances the global and local search of the algorithm; the search strategy of Lévy flight is added to the position update, so that the algorithm maintains a good population diversity and the global search ability is improved; and the speed adjustment factor is added, which effectively improves the speed and accuracy of the algorithm. The proposed algorithm was then tested using 10 benchmark functions and 2 classical engineering design optimizations. The simulation results show that the LAFBA has stronger optimization performance and higher optimization efficiency than basic bat algorithm and other bio-inspired algorithms. Furthermore, the results of the real-world engineering problems demonstrate the superiority of LAFBA in solving challenging problems with constrained and unknown search spaces.

As the industrialized agro-food supply systems have been commonly criticized for their adverse environmental and social impact, Short food supply chains have emerged as a promising sustainable alternative. Given that the history of SFSCs is relatively short, the majority of empirical evidences is from developed countries, and existing studies on SFSCs in developing country context are rather limited. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the farmers’ attitudes towards participating in SFSCs by conducting a field research in China. Semi-structured interviews were implemented with eight participants selected from a local farmer market as a pilot study. The social and economic reasons are found to be the main motivations of Chinese farmers participating in SFSCs. However, none of these interviewed participants are aware of the environmental effects of SFSCs. Moreover, the findings were cross-compared with existing studies conducted in developed countries. It was found that Chinese farmers participating in SFSCs are mainly passive choice, as they lack of relevant knowledge and governmental support.