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3879. A matheuristic for the foodbank routing problem

Invited abstract in session WB-13: Humanitarian Aid, stream Secure & Sustainable Food Supply.

Wednesday, 10:30-12:00
Room: 15 (building: 116)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Istenc Tarhan
University College Dublin
2. Ceyda Oguz
Department of Industrial Engineering, Koc University

Abstract

Zero Hunger, a UN Sustainable Development Goal, aims for a hunger-free world while also targeting the reduction of food waste. Supermarkets are major contributors to food waste due to surplus from wholesale operations. Food banks play a vital role in salvaging and distributing surplus food to the needy, but they often face budget constraints and therefore lack of transportation means. This study proposes collaboration among food banks to address these challenges, where those with transport capabilities assist smaller ones. This collaborative effort introduces a new logistical challenge, characterized by the perishable nature of foods and the selective nature of the problem—determining which supermarkets to visit, which foods to collect from visited supermarkets, which food banks to visit to deliver collected foods. This multi-objective problem aims to optimize the amount of food delivered to foodbanks as well as their fair allocation, and to minimize costs and carbon emissions associated with transportation operations. To solve this problem, we introduce a matheuristic algorithm. This algorithm iteratively solves single-vehicle subproblems and employs a master model to produce a solution for the original multi-vehicle problem, leveraging single-vehicle solutions. Computational experiments conducted with both real-life and synthetic data demonstrate the efficacy of this proposed methodology. The work described in this study is supported in part by TUBITAK 1001 grant 121M585.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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