Abstract
This paper considers the distribution system of a school feeding program (mid-day meals), wherein a set of delivery vehicles transfer cooked food from a kitchen facility to various schools within a specified delivery deadline. The food is required to be delivered before the lunch period, which is consistent across all the schools. A delay in food delivery can deprive students of their lunch, and, therefore, designing the vehicle routes for such distribution systems and maintaining a strict delivery deadline becomes critical. The resultant problem is identified as a vehicle routing problem with a common due date (VRPCDD). We provide a formulation for the VRPCDD and thereby focus on suggesting solution methods. In addition, we also demonstrate the practical application of VRPCDD by focusing on a real-life problem of a mid-day meal provider operating in the Chhattisgarh province of India.
Highlights
The recent report by “World Food Programme” [1, 2] recognizes school feeding programs as a big business worldwide
This section illustrates the solution error when VRPCDD is solved as an approximation of Distance Constrained Vehicle Routing Problem (DVRP)
We have studied a vehicle routing problem with a common due date (VRPCDD), in which all customers are served before a commonly specified deadline
Summary
The recent report by “World Food Programme” [1, 2] recognizes school feeding programs as a big business worldwide. The report outlines the importance of gaining efficiency in these programs. The problem gained further attention due to its complexity and practical applications These situations led researchers to propose exact algorithms [26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32]. A large number of articles in the VRPTW literature are based upon different meta-heuristics [35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49]. Important variations of the VRPTW include a vehicle routing problem in which customers require simultaneous pickup and delivery of goods during specific, individual time windows [50], a split delivery vehicle routing problem with time windows [51], and a VRP with multiple prioritized time windows [52]
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