INTELLIGENT ROUTING APPROACH FOR THE DISTRIBUTIONS REGARDING TO THE SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT OF AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS AND FOODS

Purpose- In this study, to effectively manage the supply chain intended for the storage, transportation and distribution of agricultural products and foods, an intelligent routing approach is proposed for accomplishing this distribution at low cost. Methodology- As an activity in logistics, the demands related to the exportation of various foods/goods in agricultural production are considered. It is assumed that a vehicle fleet, each vehicle with a certain load capacity, starts at a depot with the loads, visits a set of points using the shortest paths while accomplishing the related distributions and returns back to the depot. It is aimed to find the route set with the minimum cost so that all customers are to be visited. Findings- The main contribution of this study in which the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem has been addressed is to find the route set to service all the customers in a region while considering the points to be serviced globally; or for each sub-region, the separated tours to service the related customer group while considering them as subsets.Conclusion- Using the hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm including Genetic Algorithms and Local Search developed for the solution, low costly route sets with separated/global tours may be generated within very short periods of time.

Keywords:

Genetic algorithms, capacitated vehicle routing problem, logistics, supply chain local search,

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