Bulk wheat transportation and storage problem of public distribution system

Abstract

This research investigates the multi-period multi-modal bulk wheat transportation and storage problem in a two-stage supply chain network of Public Distribution System (PDS). The bulk transportation and storage can significantly curtail the transit and storage losses of food grains, which leads to substantial cost savings. A mixed integer non-linear programming model (MINLP) is developed after studying the Indian wheat supply chain scenario, where the objective is to minimize the transportation, storage and operational cost of the food grain incurred for efficient transfer of wheat from producing states to consuming states. The cost minimization of Indian food grain supply chain is a very complex and challenging problem because of the involvement of the many entities and their constraints such as seasonal procurement, limited scientific storages, varying demand, mode of transportation and vehicle capacity constraints. To address this complex and challenging problem of food grain supply chain, we have proposed the novel variant of Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO) algorithm which combines the features of CRO and Tabu search (TS) and named it as a hybrid CROTS algorithm (Chemical reaction optimization combined with Tabu Search). The numerous problems with different sizes are solved using the proposed algorithm and obtained results have been compared with CRO. The comparative study reveals that the proposed CROTS algorithm offers a better solution in less computational time than CRO algorithm and the dominance of CROTS algorithm over the CRO algorithm is demonstrated through statistical analysis.