Varimna Singh

Ashok Pundir

L. Ganapathy

Abstract

Timely delivery of perishable goods in order to retain freshness and quality and reduce wastage is an important practical challenge faced by several logistics supply providers. This paper considers a vehicle routing problem with non-homogeneous fleet of vehicles to transport the perishable products from multiple depots to multiple customers. To solve this problem a Mixed Integer Linear Programming model is proposed. This model considers the effect of perishability on transportation cost and on profit margin for retailers. The MILP model helps identify the optimal selection of vehicles for each depot and the optimal route for each vehicle. The proposed model is run using a simulated set of test data for various perishable products with varying life cycles and degradations patterns and the computational results are presented.

Keywords- Perishable, VRP