Facility Location and Routing Decisions for a Food Delivery Network

This paper addresses the problem of designing efficient logistical arrangements for preparation and delivery of edible food (by a voluntary organization). The short shelf-life of edible, ready-to-eat food items complicates the provisioning and distribution networks. The design of the underlying logistical system constitutes an interesting combinatorial optimization problem. Our paper explains the problem background and rigorously defines the underlying mathematical problem. Thereafter, we develop a set of algorithms/techniques (exact and heuristic) to solve the problem faster. We blend the stronger lower bounds (obtained from an alternate MIP formulation) with better upper bounds (obtained using a fast and efficient heuristic approach) to develop a new exact technique. We report the detailed results from computational analysis of our new techniques.