Abstract
Freshness of products and timeliness of delivery are two critical factors which have impact on customer satisfaction in terminal delivery of perishable products. This paper investigates how to make a cost-saving vehicle scheduling for perishable products by maximizing customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is defined from the two aspects of freshness and time window. Then we develop a priority function based on customer satisfaction and use the hierarchical clustering method to identify customer service priority. Based on the priority, a multiobjective vehicle scheduling optimization model for perishable products is formulated to maximize customer satisfaction and minimize total delivery costs. To solve the proposed model, a priority-based genetic algorithm (PB-GA) is designed. Numerical experiments and sensitivity analysis are performed to show the validity and advantage of our approach. Results indicate that PB-GA can achieve better solutions than traditional genetic algorithm. The improvement of customer satisfaction is higher than the decrease rate of total costs within a certain shelf life range, which reveals that the proposed method is applicable to the terminal delivery of perishable products.
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