Scheduling and routing models for food rescue and delivery operations

Food rescue organizations are not-for-profit organizations that aid in alleviating hunger, by rescuing the surplus food from different food providers and re-distributing to welfare agencies supporting different forms of food relief. In this study, we present a scheduling and routing model that aims at simultaneously selecting a visit combination for each food provider and welfare agency, and designing routes to meet their required service levels minimizing the total transportation cost, while satisfying certain operational constraints. This problem is driven by food relief operations in Sydney. Our specific goals are to develop an integrated linear programming model and to propose a Tabu Search based heuristic solution approach for this scheduling and routing problem. We also implement the algorithm in a realistic food rescue and delivery network in Sydney. We test our heuristic algorithm on instances taken from literature and on small instances generated similar to that of Cordeau's benchmark instances and validate our solution approach against the optimal solutions obtained through the exact method before implementing it on food rescue and delivery network. Computational experiments indicate that the proposed method outperforms existing heuristics and is able to solve the real-world scenarios using significantly fewer resources than are employed in practice.