An Agile and Reactive Biased-Randomized Heuristic for an Agri-Food Rich Vehicle Routing Problem

[EN] Operational problems in agri-food supply chains usually show characteristics that are scarcely addressed by traditional academic approaches. These characteristics make an already NP-hard problem even more challenging; hence, this problem requires the use of tailor-made algorithms in order to so...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Tordecilla, Rafael D., Copado-Méndez, Pedro J., Panadero, Javier, Martins, Leandro do C., Juan, Angel A.|||0000-0003-1392-1776
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2021
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV)
Repositorio:RiuNet. Repositorio Institucional de la Universitat Politécnica de Valéncia
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:riunet.upv.es:10251/199665
Acceso en línea:https://riunet.upv.es/handle/10251/199665
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Rich vehicle routing problem
Agri-food supply chain
Biased-randomized heuristic
ESTADISTICA E INVESTIGACION OPERATIVA
Descripción
Sumario:[EN] Operational problems in agri-food supply chains usually show characteristics that are scarcely addressed by traditional academic approaches. These characteristics make an already NP-hard problem even more challenging; hence, this problem requires the use of tailor-made algorithms in order to solve it efficiently. This work addresses a rich vehicle routing problem in a real-world agri-food supply chain. Different types of animal food products are distributed to raising-pig farms. These products are incompatible, i.e., multi-compartment heterogeneous vehicles must be employed to perform the distribution activities. The problem considers constraints regarding visit priorities among farms, and not-allowed access of large vehicles to a subset of farms. Finally, a set of flat tariffs are employed to formulate the cost function. This problem is solved employing a reactive savings-based biased-randomized heuristic, which does not require any time-costly parameter fine-tuning process. Our results show savings in both cost and traveled distance when compared with the real supply chain performance.