Cold chain logistics has advanced technologically, yet most deployed systems remain reactive monitors, not decision-making agents: thresholds trigger alerts, but nothing relates violations to cumulative product degradation or converts degradation signals into logistics decisions. We address this gap with a Quality-Aware Decision Intelligence (QADI) framework combining three capabilities: a structured quality state representation, $S_q = [L, Q, U, R]$ -- remaining shelf life, degradation rate, estimation uncertainty, and operational risk, all derived and computable from the framework equations; a hybrid quality modeling layer combining physics-based microbial kinetics with a data-driven correction term; and a reasoning layer built on Microsoft Phi-4~\cite{Phi4} with retrieval-augmented generation over a structured domain knowledge base. We benchmark against five baselines -- threshold monitoring, physics-only, physics-plus-noise, optimisation-based decisions, and a rule-based expert system -- across eight cold chain scenarios, using pasteurised milk as the primary case, with ground truth shelf-life drawn from published dairy studies~\cite{Singh1994, Smigic2015} independent of our model. Comparisons use Wilcoxon signed-rank tests with Holm correction. Across milk and broccoli scenarios, the framework attains mean absolute shelf-life error of 7.2 hours (versus 30.9 hours, physics-only; $p<0.001$), spoilage rate of 14.5% (versus 16.6%, physics-only and rule-based; p=0.08), and oracle-optimal decisions in 99.5% of scenarios. Removing the LLM reasoning component drops optimality to 45.5% ($p<0.001$). Expert-rated explanation quality reaches 83% ($κ= 0.71$). Ablations show hybrid modeling and LLM reasoning contribute distinct gains, while RAG retrieval mainly drives explanation quality. Code: https://bit.ly/4d6t44C.
Zuojun Max Shen, Yuan Qu, Pujun Zhang +2cs.AI cs.ET
As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve and mature, recent AI practices have moved beyond large language models (LLMs) and text or image generation tasks, increasingly integrating tools, agents, and harnesses to solve real business and industrial problems. However, the power of AI is not verified under these real-world complex systems for various reasons, considering reliability, feasibility, resilience, and responsibility requirements in real commercial and industrial operations. This study synthesizes adjacent research and introduces Enactive AI as a conceptual framework for enterprise and industry reasoning, site-level decision support, and execution feedback. Four complementary roles organize the framework: an Organizational World defines operations management logic and an organizational behavior world model behind an enterprise from a strategic-institutional horizon; a Site World defines a physically bounded industrial optimization and execution world model from an operational-realization horizon; Schema Intelligence provides the coupling mechanism between two world models to weave various AI applications via two models; and Enactive Decision Cycle triggers the self-evolving dynamic process to update and audit the entire framework. By foregrounding decision intelligence in complex systems, Enactive AI expands the frontier of AI from model capability to system-aware action, opening new possibilities for scalable, governable, and socially valuable AI deployment. Enactive AI points toward a future in which AI progress is measured not only by what models can generate or automate, but by how reliably intelligent systems can support consequential action, responsible governance, and durable social value in the complex systems that shape modern life, which we believe will define the next frontier of AI research for enterprise-level and industrial complex systems.