Production routing in perishable and quality degradable supply chains

Generally, the major goal in perishable supply chains is preserving the product's quality along with improving its logistic performance. In this regard, temperature seems to be the most important and most sensitive factor, since uncontrolled temperature has shown to have great impact on reducing product quality. In this study, an integrated production routing model for a perishable product was developed; considering the production, inventory, storage temperature, routing and vehicle temperature. To solve the problem, a hybrid search algorithm combining the variable of neighborhood search algorithm and the mechanism of the simulated annealing algorithm was designed. In order to evaluate the validity of the proposed algorithm, its results were compared with that of the CPLEX solver in the GAMZ software environment. Comparison of the results of the two methods shows the efficiency of the proposed algorithm to solve this problem. As a case study, the proposed model was also applied in a real industrial case. According to the results, this company can greatly reduce its distribution and inventory costs and also avoid waste by using this program.