An optimization model for cold chain food distribution

Food product has a characteristic of continuous quality deterioration until the food is consumed. Cold chain distribution can improve the sustainability of the product quality but requires a more significant investment for storage facilities and vehicles as well as higher operation cost to control the temperature. This research focuses on a distribution problem faced by an ice cream distributor. In this paper, we developed a mixed-integer non-linear programming model to minimize the total cost, which consists of fixed cost, transportation cost of the vehicles, energy cost to keep the cold storage temperature, and inventory cost. The model considers the vehicle characteristics and hard time-windows for the distributor and all the stores. The implementation of this model demonstrates that the proposed route is able to reduce the total cost.