Models for Food Rescue and Delivery: Routing and Resource Allocation Problem

Food rescue and delivery program helps to alleviate hunger by rescuing the unspoiled surplus food that would have otherwise found its way to landfill, and distributing it to people in need. This is a large scale collection, distribution and inventory management problem and is challenged by numerous operational issues. The gap between the food recovered (supply) and the delivery request (demand) have increased the attention on the effective and the equitable allocation of rescued food. The rescue and the delivery of food surplus should meet several criteria such as minimising routing costs and waste as well as ensuring an equitable distribution of the resources collected among welfare agencies. Specifically, the traditional cost minimising approach in pickup and delivery operations focuses mainly on efficient routing, and may lead to an inequitable distribution of the rescued food. In this paper, the authors propose two additional objective functions designed to promote their social interest, fair and equitable resource allocation within the food rescue program: maximize the total satisfaction of delivery customers (welfare agencies) and maximize the satisfaction of the least satisfied delivery customer. Both objectives are combined with the traditional transportation cost minimization to provide balanced solutions. They explore the behaviour and the performance of the proposed models as well as the satisfaction of the welfare agencies and the structure of the obtained routes. They compare the ability of the proposed models to enhance the equitable distribution of rescued food without losing sight of the transportation costs.

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• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AT015 Standing Committee on Freight Transportation Planning and Logistics.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Nair, Divya J
  • Rey, David
  • Dixit, Vinayak
  • Valenta, Troy
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 95th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2016-1-10 to 2016-1-14
• Date: 2016

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 16p
• Monograph Title: TRB 95th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Customer satisfaction; Food; Pickup and delivery service; Resource allocation; Routing
• Subject Areas: Freight Transportation; Planning and Forecasting; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01590742
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 16-2584
• Files: PRP, TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 22 2016 1:18PM