01661595

Component

The authors address the food rescue and delivery problem encountered in the field of humanitarian logistics. This logistical problem arises in food rescue organizations, which collect surplus perishable food from donors and re-distribute it on the same day to welfare agencies for hunger relief. The food rescue and delivery problem can be represented as a fair allocation and routing problem. The authors present a new mixed-integer linear programming formulation and introduce a new heuristic algorithm that represents vehicle flow using a tree-based structure and recursively traverse the trees to identify feasible and balanced solutions. The authors evaluate their solution algorithm on instances representative of realistic operations prepared using data from OzHarvest, a food rescue organization in Sydney, Australia. The authors' results show that the proposed tree-based heuristic is able to provide competitive and near envy-free solutions for large-scale food rescue and delivery operations in a few seconds.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AT015 Standing Committee on Freight Transportation Planning and Logistics.

18-06177

English

18p

2018

Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Decision trees; Delivery service; Food; Heuristic methods; Logistics; Low income groups; Mixed integer programming; Routing

Sydney (Australia)

Freight Transportation; Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2018 Paper #18-06177

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 8 2018 11:36AM