The demand for accurate and effective cool chains has been expected to increase, especially for pharmaceuticals in the air freight industry. However, several problems and challenges remain such as cool chain breaks and cool storage capacity constraints while there are rarely routine systems in place for consistent insight into the operational quality of such systems. Besides, the concept of a DT has received increasing attention in the literature, while a multitude of applications have been found in fresh cool chains. Therefore, the DT concept has been applied to a pharmaceutical cool chain for operational quality improvement. Firstly, a novel operational quality metric has been proposed: the OCCE. Consequently, a cool chain at KLM Cargo has been studied and modelled by means of the DES technique in order to derive a virtual representation. Consequently, the DT concept has been applied through the implementation of a decision support module for cool storage decision-making. The model implementation has shown that the cool chain operational quality has been improved while the average exposure of freight has decreased.

Due to the short shelf-life of flowers (circa 7 days) good inventory management is required to minimize disposals. The trade-off between supplying enough to meet demand yet not too much to prevent expiration is a delicate matter. However, in the current situation uncertainty about inventory levels due to inadequate information and conventional replenishment strategies lead to a situation that does not perform efficiently. This paper demonstrates how an RFID overhead system can be designed that has 98\% reading performance for inventory. Furthermore is showed how this access to better information can already lead to a reduction between 30-50\%, depending on the type of distribution the demand follows. If there are obvious seasonal trends, then the better information in combination with optimal control can have a reduction of 90\% in disposed products with the same availability of products. These reductions are significantly sufficient to conclude that the benefits comfortably break-even with the investments from the inventory system.