Optimal Vegetables Transportation Network in Rural Areas of Khorasan Razavi Province

Optimizing the transportation of agricultural products plays an important role in reducing production costs and helps reduce the market margin of these products. Khorasan Razavi province is one of the major provinces of country in the production of vegetables. Due to the wide range of vegetables produced in the province, an efficient transportation network is required in order to increase the productivity of machinery and reduce the associated costs. The aim of the present study is to design an optimal network for transporting these products from production areas in the province to maintenance centers and ultimate consumption areas in year 2016. To this end, the mathematical programming models of transportation have been used. Based on this, a combined transportation was designed that has 45 origin notes and 49 destination notes and a number of mid-nodes including warehouse and refrigerator. The results of the study showed that approximately 22.51% of the shipping costs would be reduced if the optimal routes provided by the model were used. Finally, in order to analyze the susceptibility of the model, two scenarios with the deviations from the optimal model were solved that results indicated that increasing demand for vegetables will increase transportation costs, while increase in production and capacity of machinery will reduce shipping costs.