Fair allocation and cost-effective routing models for food rescue and redistribution

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe not-for-profit food rescue organizations play a vital role in alleviating hunger in many developing and developed countries. They rescue surplus food from the business sector and redistribute to welfare agencies supporting different forms of food relief. Routing and allocation decisions are critical in food rescue operations, in particular when there is a significant gap between supply and demand. However, there is a gap in the literature with regards to models that account for fairness in the allocation of limited rescued food along with efficient routing. We present three objective functions: utilitarian, egalitarian, and deviation-based for efficient and fair food allocation, and present a goal programming–based formulation combining cost-effective routing and allocation objectives to obtain balanced solutions. We propose and implement a heuristic solution algorithm for this food relief logistics problem and report numerical results from realistic food rescue instances.