Abstract
This study considers the distribution network of a well-known perishable food manufacturer and its franchises in Turkey. As the countrywide number of stores is increasing fast, the company is facing problems due to its central distribution of products from a single factory. The objective is to decrease the cost of transportation while maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction. Hence, the focus is on the vehicle routing problem (VRP) of this large franchise chain within each city. The problem is defined as a rich VRP with heterogeneous fleet, site-dependent and compartmentalized vehicles, and soft/hard time windows. This NP-hard problem is modelled and tried with real data on a commercial solver. A basic heuristic procedure which can be used easily by the decision makers is also employed for obtaining quick and high-quality solutions for large instances.
Highlights
Production, handling and distribution of food and confectionary products demands a precise, climate-controlled environment, as well as facilities that will guarantee safe and reliable storage to protect the integrity of the goods
The problem is defined as a rich vehicle routing problem (VRP) with heterogeneous fleet, site-dependent and compartmentalized vehicles, and soft/hard time windows
For handling the soft time windows in the problem, the Savings Heuristic (SSH) heuristic was executed at three levels of hard time window upper bounds (UB) for stores as 300, 360 and 420 minutes
Summary
Production, handling and distribution of food and confectionary products demands a precise, climate-controlled environment, as well as facilities that will guarantee safe and reliable storage to protect the integrity of the goods. The case study considered in this paper involves one of the largest confectionary franchise chains in Turkey, founded in 1938. The factory currently produces 60 thousand servings of cakes, 150 thousand servings of milk puddings, 20 thousand servings of syrupy desserts, 7 tons of ice cream, 300 kilograms of handmade chocolate and 5 tons of pastry products daily. In addition to this product range, the brand offers yogurt varieties and buttermilk. At the time of the study, the company has been distributing its products to 179 franchise stores (dealers) in 46 cities, as well as some big supermarket chains. Besides the main facilities in Izmir, there are two warehouses Ankara and Adana, and three cross-docking centres in Istanbul, Antalya and Bursa
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