A mathematical model and solution methods for rail freight transportation planning in an Indian food grain supply chain

Abstract

This paper addresses the rail transportation of food grains undertaken by Food Corporation of India (FCI) to meet the requirements of the food security programme called Public Distribution System (PDS). The research focuses on improving the allocation of railway rakes transporting food grains to a set of storage warehouses. A penalty factor based approach is adopted to represent the considerations in transportation planning and three penalty factors such as rake penalty factor, weekly penalty factor and capacity utilization penalty factor are introduced for the purpose. The single source-multiple destination problem is formulated and solved using exact method to minimize the sum of these three penalty factor values, termed total penalty. Further, a heuristic named optimum rake allocation algorithm is developed and tested using a set of 35 problem instances. The proposed heuristic is found to be highly efficient in terms of solution quality and computation time. A case study of FCI Kerala Region is also carried out to validate the formulated model and the proposed heuristic. The work provides valuable insights into the practical issues encountered in rail freight transportation planning and proposes an effective solution methodology to address them.

Identification of transport and technological problems in the grain product subcomplex

“…The heuristic introduced is highly effective, delivering quality solutions rapidly. The paper [14] focuses on the rail transport of food grains by the Food Corporation of India (FCI) for India's Public Distribution System, proposing a penalty factor-based method for transportation planning and introducing a heuristic called ORAA for generating efficient solutions. This aims to support FCI managers in effectively orchestrating food grain transportation.…”

Modelling of sustainable food grain supply chain distribution system: a bi-objective approach

“…Due to the mismatch between the supply and demand of particular states, food grain has to be transferred from producing (surplus) states to consuming (deficit) states (Maiyar and Thakkar 2017;Mogale et al 2017;Mahapatra and Mahanty 2018;Balani et al 2013). The major wheat producing and consuming states in India are situated in a large geographically dispersed area which results in more fuel consumption for food grain transportation (Reddy et al 2017;Anoop et al 2018, High level committee report (HLC) 2015). The food grain is transported from surplus to deficit states through rail mode to meet the demand of the peoples (HLC 2015;CAG 2013;Maiyar et al 2015;Balani et al 2013).…”

Minimum cost berth allocation problem in maritime logistics: new mixed integer programming models

“…Based on the review of literature, it is seen that many studies have adopted complex binary variable structures in the mathematical formulations related to logistics (e.g., [19,20]) and also in the mathematical formulations of the BAP in maritime logistics (especially the work by Hansen et al [5]). The MILP model proposed by Hansen et al [5] was not able to solve a sample problem instance of size 5 berths and 10 ships optimally in a reasonable time, and this limitation was specifically reported in section 2 of Hansen et al [5].…”

“…Constraints (17) and (18) restrict the simultaneous computation of earliness and lateness of a vessel. Finally, expression (19) defines all the binary variables and continuous variables. Note that the binary variable w i is introduced because service completion can be either early or late but not both for a vessel.…”