An integrated distribution scheduling and route planning of food cold chain with demand surge

Abstract

With the rapid development of e-commerce, customers could order online to ensure timeliness. Therefore, e-commerce enterprises need to pick and distribute customers’ orders. These two operations are interdependent. Order picking needs to consider the vehicle route planning. At the same time, the vehicle route planning is also based on the batching of orders. Considering the demand surge scenario of food cold chain, with the shortest time and lowest cost to complete all distribution tasks as the objective, this paper aims at the integrated optimization of distribution scheduling and route planning, and establishes a mixed integer programming mathematical model. Finally, we design a three-stage heuristic algorithm to solve this problem, and use the actual data to carry out numerical experiments to verify the reliability and effectiveness of the mathematical model and heuristic algorithm.

Optimizing Utilization of Transport Capacities in the Cold Chain by Introducing Dynamic Allocation of Semi-Trailers

“…Transport cost, is considered as one of the criteria in papers , and as a single optimization criterion in papers [46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65]. Optimizing transportation routes with the goal of minimizing costs involves defining the most efficient route that vehicles can take to reduce the variable costs (such as fuel, tolls, etc.)…”