Abstract
In recent years, cold food chains have shown an impressive growth, mainly due to customers life style changes. Consequently, the transportation of refrigerated food is becoming a crucial aspect of the chain, aiming at ensuring efficiency and sustainability of the process while keeping a high level of product quality. The recently defined Refrigerated Routing Problem (RRP) consists of finding the optimal delivery tour that minimises the fuel consumption for both the traction and the refrigeration components. The total fuel consumption is related, in a complex way, to the distance travelled, the vehicle load and speed, and the outdoor temperature. All these factors depend, in turn, on the traffic and the climate conditions of the region where deliveries take place and they change during the day and the year. The original RRP has been extended to take into account also the total driving cost and to add the possibility to slow down the deliveries by allowing arbitrarily long waiting times when this is beneficial for the objective function. The new RRP is formulated and solved as both a Mixed Integer Programming and a novel Constraint Programming model. Moreover, a Local Search metaheuristic technique (namely Late Acceptance Hill Climbing), based on a combination of different neighborhood structures, is also proposed. The results obtained by the different solution methods on a set of benchmarks scenarios are compared and discussed.
Highlights
In the last decade, cold chains have recorded an impressive growth due to both urbanization and lifestyle changes, which have produced an increasing demand of ready-to-use refrigerated and frozen food
The transition towards sustainable transport, which can be defined as a way of the transport sector to embrace the concept of sustainable development, has attracted great attention of academics, industry practitioners and governments in the last two decades, as highlighted in the recent review by Zhao et al [2]
Sustainability has an even greater role due to additional energy required to assure the proper control of food temperature [3]
Summary
Cold chains have recorded an impressive growth due to both urbanization and lifestyle changes, which have produced an increasing demand of ready-to-use refrigerated and frozen food. The transport sector is known to be one of the major contributor to global energy consumption and related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Sustainability has an even greater role due to additional energy required to assure the proper control of food temperature [3]. Since a temperature raise might be harmful for both the safety and the quality of the delivered products, the refrigeration needs adds additional energy requirements to vehicle traction, increasing fuel consumption and greenhouse GHG emissions. Increasing the efficiency of refrigerated transport is ranked as the third energy
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