Service network design in short and local fresh food supply chain

Abstract

This paper aims at developing efficient solving methods for an original service network design problem imbued with sustainable issues. Indeed the network has to be designed for short and local supply chain and for fresh food products. The original features of the problem are the seasonality of supply, the limitation of transshipments for a product and no possibility of storage between consecutive periods. Decisions at strategic and tactical level are (1) decisions on a subset of hubs to open among a given set of potential locations, (2) transportation services to open between the actors and (3) flow quantities for the fresh food products. We propose for this problem a Mixed Integer Programming formulation and two solving techniques: Benders Decomposition and Dynamic Slope Scaling Procedure. These techniques are adapted to the problem and some experimental tests are conducted in order to compare the approaches on large-scale instances.

Solutions for More Sustainable Distribution in the Short Food Supply Chains

“…Finally, environmental criteria are also influenced by SFSC. Since producers have a greater number of interactions with final consumers, they can adopt more reasonable agricultural methods, by reducing the use of chemical products in this field for example, upon the request of the end users [8].…”

“…Hence, producers have to pay much more attention to marketing and distribution of their products, which is not at the core of their business. As it was stated in Reference [8], this approach is feasible, in certain ways, for direct sales, while for indirect sales volumes are more significant, considering that a supply chain has to be properly designed in order to organize the flow of goods and minimize transportation costs so one can become competitive with the global supply chain. Thus, the 'challenges regarding the distribution of food in SFSC are related to the issue of cost related justification towards the realization of logistics activities' [20], due to the lack of a suitable logistical delivery infrastructure.…”

A location-allocation model for quality-based blood supply chain under IER uncertainty

“…Amorim et al [3] proposed production and distribution planning as a multi-objective model for perishable products with fixed and loose shelf-life to meet customer satisfaction in terms of both economic and freshness aspects. Ogier et al [33] presented a mixed integer programming formulation to design a short and local fresh food supply chain network. They developed effective techniques to solve the model.…”

A sequential approach for a multi-commodity two-echelon distribution problem

“…Routes are then optimized using a dedicated software (Route LogiX). Ogier et al (2013) propose a mixed integer linear programming model for service network design of a short and local supply chain.…”