MILP approaches to sustainable production and distribution of meal elements

Abstract

This paper studies the production and distribution system for professionally prepared meals, in which a new innovative concept is applied. The concept aims to improve the sustainability of the system by distributing meal elements super-chilled in the conventional cold chain. Here, sustainability comprises economic, environmental and social aspects. The impacts on and trade-offs between the different dimensions of sustainability are discussed, and combined with aspect of product quality. Furthermore, we identify the important planning decisions in relation to production and distribution and organise these in a decision hierarchy. Based on these discussions, decision support models based on mixed-integer linear programming are developed for the planning tasks on the tactical level, including decision-making on packaging options and delivery structures. The resulting models can be used to support production and distribution planning, and also evaluate the performance of and quantify the trade-offs between the different sustainability dimensions.