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Grain supply chains (GSCs) are crucial for global food security, economic development, and environmental sustainability. This study investigates the complexities and challenges of enhancing the resilience of GSCs. The research unravels decision-making intricacies, assesses post-harvest risks and stakeholder interactions, and identifies future research avenues. This systematic literature review (SLR), following PRISMA guidelines, and conducted with two search rounds, addressed questions of resilience and efficiency of post-harvest GSCs, key decision factors of stakeholders influencing the sustainability and operational success of GSCs, and methods that can be used to develop robust decision-making for managing risks and uncertainties in GSCs. A comprehensive database of post-2000 journal articles from the Web of Science and Scopus was analysed using bibliometric and content analysis. This research identified five key themes: (1) operational complexity requiring strategic resilience, (2) comprehensive risk management strategies, (3) critical role of transport and storage infrastructure, (4) significant impact of stakeholder decisions on GSC dynamics, and (5) diverse methodological approaches for robust analysis. These themes illustrate the multifaceted challenges and opportunities within GSCs, suggesting that integrating operations research with behavioural economics is vital for improving strategic decision-making. The results advocate for adopting advanced technologies and innovative multidisciplinary methods to improve GSC efficiency and resilience, which are essential for navigating geopolitical tensions, market fluctuations, and complex stakeholder behaviours. It identified under-researched areas such as farmer transport decisions and logistics provider selection, and integrated emerging themes (such as resilience and behavioural aspects), contributing to the body of knowledge and supporting enhanced decision-making in GSCs for a stable global food supply system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fresh roundwood loses quality during storage at roadside primarily through blue stain and insect infestation leading to wood value loss. The potential of altitude zone-based risk forecasts to prioritize spruce sawlog piles at devaluation risk for unimodal and multimodal transport strategies was evaluated with a discrete event simulation model. This enabled tracking roundwood quality development through the supply chain as well as identifying and modelling the relationship between lead time and roundwood quality devaluation. Respective regression analyses showed that the procurement lead time is a significant predictor of the downgraded roundwood amount, explaining over 98% of the variance of downgraded wood. This knowledge was applied to provide practical decision support for procurement management. Presented transport strategies using roundwood quality forecasts significantly outperformed those currently being used by preventing, on average, 57% of the roundwood devaluation in a case study. Moreover, 73% of the devaluation could be avoided if up to 25% supplementary truck transport capacity was deployable in peak periods. If no additional self-loading trucks were available, still 67% of the devaluation could be prevented by using the bottleneck resource more efficiently through transferring 20% of the roundwood to rail wagons leading to a more sustainable and resilient wood procurement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]