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Meat quality is highly influenced by chilling conditions during storage and transport. In these phases meat temperature is often heavily influenced by the logistic of the adopted processing and delivering systems. In fact, from slaughter to consumer, beef carcasses movements are driven by a sequence of events depending on different factors such as work scheduling, storage cells capacity, time-table of delivering, etc.. During these occurrences, meat temperature vary in a continuous way mainly depending on the room temperature at which is exposed.

With the aim to optimize storage and distribution chains, a hybrid model, where discrete events and time-continuous behaviors are jointly considered, has been developed.

The model has been identified and validated using data collected in some CE slaughtering certified plants (in Piemonte region, Italy) and describes the temperature of the meat during the storage and delivering processes taking into account the logistic and the degree of utilization of the plant and of the available resources.

Finally, with the aim to improve and optimize plant efficiency and meat quality, different logistic alternatives have been evaluated by varying the parameters of the refrigeration plants and/or the work and delivery scheduling.