A multi-start optimization-based heuristic for a food bank distribution problem

Mohammad Reihaneh and Ahmed Ghoniem

Journal of the Operational Research Society, 2018, vol. 69, issue 5, 691-706

Abstract: We investigate a variant of the vehicle routing-allocation problem that arises in the distribution of pallets of goods by a food bank to a network of relatively distant nonprofit organizations. Vehicles are routed to selected intermediate delivery sites to which the nonprofit organizations travel to collect their demand. The logistical cost is shared, and the objective is to minimize a weighted average of the food bank vehicle routing cost and the travel cost of the nonprofit organizations. This paper develops an efficient multi-start heuristic that iteratively constructs the initial solutions to this problem and subsequently explores their neighborhoods via local improvement and perturbation schemes. In our experience, the proposed heuristic substantially outperforms alternative optimization-based heuristics in the literature in terms of the solution quality and computational efficiency and yields solutions with an optimality gap often below 0.5%.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1057/s41274-017-0220-9 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:tjorxx:v:69:y:2018:i:5:p:691-706

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/tjor20

DOI: 10.1057/s41274-017-0220-9

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the Operational Research Society is currently edited by Tom Archibald

More articles in Journal of the Operational Research Society from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().