Multi-objective optimization for perishable product dispatch in a FEFO system for a food bank single warehouse

Carlos Aníbal Suárez, Walter A. Guaño, Cinthia C. Pérez and Heydi Roa-López

Operations Research Perspectives, 2024, vol. 12, issue C

Abstract: One of the main challenges of food bank warehouses in developing countries is to determine how to allocate perishable products to beneficiary agencies with different expiry dates while ensuring food safety, meeting nutritional requirements, and minimizing the shortage. The contribution of this research is to introduce a new multi-objective, multi-product, and multi-period perishable food allocation problem based on a single warehouse management system for a First Expired-First Out (FEFO) policy. Moreover, it incorporates the temporal aspect, guaranteeing the dispatch of only those perishable products that meet the prescribed minimum quality standards. A weighted sum approach converts the multi-objective problem of minimizing a vector of objective functions into a scalar problem by constructing a weighted sum of all the objectives. The problem can then be solved using a standard constrained optimization procedure. The proposed mixed integer linear model is solved by using the CPLEX solver. The solution obtained from the multi-objective problem allows us to identify days and products experiencing shortages. In such cases, when there is insufficient available inventory, the total quantity of product to be dispatched is redistributed among beneficiaries according to a pre-established prioritization. These redistributions are formulated as integer programming problems using a score-based criterion and solved by an exact method based on dynamic programming. Computational results demonstrate the applicability of the novel model for perishable items to a real-world study case.

Keywords: Linear optimization; Multi-objective programming; Perishable products; FEFO; Dynamic programming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214716024000083
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:oprepe:v:12:y:2024:i:c:s2214716024000083

DOI: 10.1016/j.orp.2024.100304

Access Statistics for this article

Operations Research Perspectives is currently edited by Rubén Ruiz Garcia

More articles in Operations Research Perspectives from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().