Integrated Production Inventory Routing Planning for Intelligent Food Logistics Systems

An intelligent logistics system is an important branch of intelligent transportation systems. It is a great challenge to develop efficient technologies and methodologies to improve its performance in meeting customer requirements while this is highly related to people's life quality. Its high efficiency can reduce food waste, improve food quality and safety, and enhance the competitiveness of food companies. In this paper, we investigate a new integrated planning problem for intelligent food logistics systems. Two objectives are considered: minimizing total production, inventory, and transportation cost and maximizing average food quality. For the problem, a bi-objective mixed integer linear programming model is formulated first. Then, a new method that combines an epsilon-constraint-based two-phase iterative heuristic and a fuzzy logic method is developed to solve it. Computational results on a case study and on 185 randomly generated instances with up to 100 retailers and 12 periods show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.