Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to propose an effective and economical management platform to realize real-time tracking and tracing for prepackaged food supply chain based on Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, and finally ensure a benign and safe food consumption environment. Design/methodology/approach: Following service-oriented architecture, a flexible layered architecture of tracking and tracing platform for prepackaged food is developed. Besides, to reduce the implementation cost while realizing fine-grained tracking and tracing, an integrated solution of using both the QR code and radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag is proposed. Furthermore, Extensible Markup Language (XML) is adopted to facilitate the information sharing among applications and stakeholders. Findings: The validity of the platform has been evaluated through a case study. First, the proposed platform is proved highly effective on realizing prepackaged food tracking and tracing throughout its supply chain, and can benefit all the stakeholders involved. Second, the integration of the QR code and RFID technologies is proved to be economical and could well ensure the real-time data collection. Third, the XML-based method is efficient to realize information sharing during the whole process. Originality/value: The contributions of this paper lie in three aspects. First, the technical architecture of IoT-based tracking and tracing platform is developed. It could realize fine-grained tracking and tracing and could be flexible to adapt in many other areas. Second, the solution of integrating the QR code and RFID technologies is proposed, which could greatly decrease the cost of adopting the platform. Third, this platform enables the information sharing among all the involved stakeholders, which will further facilitate their cooperation on guaranteeing the quality and safety of prepackaged food.

The selection of fresh product suppliers is a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem with great significant and application value. This requires trade-offs between multiple criteria to prove its ambiguity and uncertainty. Therefore, a novel two-stage fuzzy integrated MCDM method to select suitable suppliers is employed. In the first stage, two collective relationship matrixes are constructed by quality function development (QFD), and relationships among customer requirements (CRs), company strategies (CSs) as well as selection criteria are considered separately in the two matrixes. Subjective criteria weights are obtained by fuzzy best-worst method (BWM) appropriately. In the second stage, the objective criteria weights are obtained using Shannon’s entropy method, and the fuzzy multi-objective optimization by ratio analysis plus the full multiplicative form (MULTIMOORA) is applied to rank suppliers. Finally, an application case is applied to prove the feasibility of the proposed method. These conclusions can help companies improve their CSs and increase their market competitiveness.

Drivers' route choice model is essential in transportation software such as navigation, fleet management, and simulation, where the random utility models (RUM) have dominated for years. The authors investigate here whether machine learning (ML) models could be applied into this field, and whether these approaches outperform the traditional models in goodness‐of‐fit and prediction. The application framework and data structure are proposed, where the challenging problems lie in: (i) to pool data from multiple origin–destination pairs; and (ii) to interpret results for behaviour analysis. All RUM and ML models are applied in a real network. Results suggest that the random forest, one of the ML models, has satisfying performances with acceptable computation time, making it suitable for large network and real‐time analysis. This study shows that the ML models can be adopted for behaviour analysis, such as to prioritise the importance of variables, compute the elasticity, and forecast for scenarios. Future directions on combining the RUM and ML models are discussed.