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<p>Distribution of fresh vegetables has always been a concern and area of research as they are perishable. This paper formulates a vehicle routing problem with backhauling (VRPB) having a heterogeneous fleet. The objective is to find the optimum route between the warehouse, linehaul delivery nodes, and backhaul collection nodes that minimise transportation costs. The existing literature on VRPB needs more real-life instances than benchmark instances. This research presents an example of the VRPB for transporting fresh vegetables produced by small and marginal farmers in Thiruvananthapuram-Kerala. Each vehicle leaves the warehouse to deliver the locally produced fresh vegetables to institutes and small retail outlets (linehaul customers), pick up the produce from farmer clusters (backhaul customers) and return it to the warehouse. Currently, the vehicle routes on each day are decided by the logistics manager of Horticorp (Kerala government agency) based on his experience and considering customers' demand requirements, which results in higher operating costs. The case example with 140 nodes is solved using the Large Neighbourhood Search algorithm in the VRP spreadsheet solver. The result provided significant savings in transportation costs. Further, a numerical test is conducted on a small problem (10 nodes) using GAMS 41.5 software with a LINDO solver, and the results obtained are compared with those of the VRP spreadsheet solver. The computational result shows that the VRP spreadsheet solver's solution outperforms the one obtained using GAMS, albeit with a lower optimality gap.</p>

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Vehicle routing model with backhauling for distribution of fresh vegetables among small retail channels: a case study in Kerala, India

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2025年2月12日

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  • R. S. Sreerag,
  • Prasanna Venkatesan Shanmugam

摘要

Distribution of fresh vegetables has always been a concern and area of research as they are perishable. This paper formulates a vehicle routing problem with backhauling (VRPB) having a heterogeneous fleet. The objective is to find the optimum route between the warehouse, linehaul delivery nodes, and backhaul collection nodes that minimise transportation costs. The existing literature on VRPB needs more real-life instances than benchmark instances. This research presents an example of the VRPB for transporting fresh vegetables produced by small and marginal farmers in Thiruvananthapuram-Kerala. Each vehicle leaves the warehouse to deliver the locally produced fresh vegetables to institutes and small retail outlets (linehaul customers), pick up the produce from farmer clusters (backhaul customers) and return it to the warehouse. Currently, the vehicle routes on each day are decided by the logistics manager of Horticorp (Kerala government agency) based on his experience and considering customers' demand requirements, which results in higher operating costs. The case example with 140 nodes is solved using the Large Neighbourhood Search algorithm in the VRP spreadsheet solver. The result provided significant savings in transportation costs. Further, a numerical test is conducted on a small problem (10 nodes) using GAMS 41.5 software with a LINDO solver, and the results obtained are compared with those of the VRP spreadsheet solver. The computational result shows that the VRP spreadsheet solver's solution outperforms the one obtained using GAMS, albeit with a lower optimality gap.