Vehicle Routing Problem Of Urban Vegetable Distribution System Which Serves Foodservice Operators

With the increase of living standard and life style change among cityresidents, having meals in restaurant becomes a more frequent activity andtherefore foodservice operators become more and more significant as aconsumer in vegetable supply chain. Food service operators also involvecanteens in hospitals, schools and nursing houses. Vegetable supply chain isan important part of city distribution system which is attracting more andmore attention in recent years. The government’s awareness (several officedocuments on distribution system were issued) also stress the significanceof the problem, which makes the study on the food distribution network ofsuch big group consumer matter a lot. This paper studies a subquestion ofthe vegetable distribution network of big group consumer which is theVehicle Routing Problem (VRP) of vegetable distribution vehicles. Bystudying on this subquestion, the efficiency of the whole distributionnetwork is improved since the operation of distributor is optimized.The first and second section of this paper describes the basic theoremof Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) and reviews related works. Then thepresent situation of Shanghai food supply chain network and the fooddistribution network of local big group consumer is studied and the featuresand some key problem of this supply chain network are discussed. It isidentified that the operational efficiency of the food distribution company isone of the bottlenecks of the network. In the fourth section a mathematicalmodel is built and generic algorithm is adopted to solve the VRPoptimization of the urban vegetable distribution problem. The main featureof the model built is that in addition to the common features of VRP problem modeling, it takes into consideration also the constraint of limited trafficroute. A case study is then presented to prove the effectiveness of the newmethod under the constraint of limited traffic route. Numerical results showthat the new method could be adopted as assistant decision making systemin the operation of the food distribution companies.