A Tree-Based Heuristic for Equitable Food Relief Operations
The authors address the food rescue and delivery problem encountered in the field of humanitarian logistics. This logistical problem arises in food rescue organizations, which collect surplus perishable food from donors and re-distribute it on the same day to welfare agencies for hunger relief. The food rescue and delivery problem can be represented as a fair allocation and routing problem. The authors present a new mixed-integer linear programming formulation and introduce a new heuristic algorithm that represents vehicle flow using a tree-based structure and recursively traverse the trees to identify feasible and balanced solutions. The authors evaluate their solution algorithm on instances representative of realistic operations prepared using data from OzHarvest, a food rescue organization in Sydney, Australia. The authors' results show that the proposed tree-based heuristic is able to provide competitive and near envy-free solutions for large-scale food rescue and delivery operations in a few seconds.
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Supplemental Notes:
- This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AT015 Standing Committee on Freight Transportation Planning and Logistics.
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Authors:
- Rey, David
- Almi'ani, Khaled
- Nair, Divya J
- Waller, S Travis
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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: 18p
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Decision trees; Delivery service; Food; Heuristic methods; Logistics; Low income groups; Mixed integer programming; Routing
- Geographic Terms: Sydney (Australia)
- Subject Areas: Freight Transportation; Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting;
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 01661595
- Record Type: Publication
- Report/Paper Numbers: 18-06177
- Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
- Created Date: Feb 28 2018 5:00PM