Integrated Thermal Insulation Packing and Vehicle Routing for Perishable Products in Community Group Purchase

Wenbing Shui, Huimin Zhao, Mengxia Li and Tingsong Wang

Discrete Dynamics in Nature and Society, 2021, vol. 2021, 1-13

Abstract: Two transportation modes have been used to solve the “last kilometer†delivery problem of perishable products in China. One mode involves the use of refrigerated vehicles, and the other involves transportation with nonrefrigerated vehicles but with thermal insulation packaging and phase-change refrigerants. In this paper, we studied the distribution of fresh products using nonrefrigerated vehicles under the community group purchase model. A new integrated model that can simultaneously select insulation packaging methods and vehicle paths was developed. We designed a heuristic algorithm based on genetic algorithm to solve larger-scale problems. We found that nonrefrigerated vehicle delivery was better than refrigerated vehicle delivery when neither the cost of the phase-change refrigerant nor the cost of packaging accounts for more than 50% of the total cost. There was an optimal balance between insulation packaging cost and shipping cost. The combination of thin and light packaging materials and high-efficiency cold storage materials could achieve the goals of ensuring the quality of fresh products and reducing transportation costs simultaneously.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/ddns/2021/6673555.pdf (application/pdf)
http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/ddns/2021/6673555.xml (application/xml)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hin:jnddns:6673555

DOI: 10.1155/2021/6673555

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Discrete Dynamics in Nature and Society from Hindawi
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mohamed Abdelhakeem ().