Application of Allocation and Routing Model on Food Rescue and Delivery Network

The food rescue organizations rescue surplus food from the business sector and re-distribute to welfare agencies supporting different forms of food relief. The paper presents a routing and allocation model for the food rescue and delivery operations in Sydney. It aims at optimizing the routing cost, fairness in allocation and perishable food wasted accounting for the gap in supply of rescued food and the demand of welfare agencies. The study extends the well-known Vehicle Routing Problem by appending additional decision variables representing the amount of rescued food delivered at the delivery customers. An egalitarian welfare utility function is used to incorporate fairness in the allocation structure. The study then presents a goal-programming approach to obtain balanced solutions for the multi-objective food rescue and delivery problem. In light of the intensive computational resources required to solve the food rescue and delivery problem on large scale network, the study builds on the existing heuristic solution methods for the Vehicle Routing Problem and propose a tailored Tabu Search heuristic algorithm that incorporates allocation and routing decisions. This solution algorithm is then implemented on realistic food rescue scenarios sampled from operational data obtained from OzHarvest, one of the largest food rescue organizations in Australia.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AT015 Standing Committee on Freight Transportation Planning and Logistics.
• Authors:
  • Nair, Divya Jayakumar
  • Dixit, Vinayak
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2018-1-7 to 2018-1-11
• Date: 2018

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 15p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Algorithms; Costs; Disasters and emergency operations; Equity (Justice); Food; Optimization; Perishables; Routes and routing
• Geographic Terms: Sydney (Australia)
• Subject Areas: Freight Transportation; Planning and Forecasting; Security and Emergencies;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01661376
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 18-03850
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 27 2018 9:44AM