An Integrated Supply, Production and Distribution Model in Airline Food Supply Chain Considering Overall and Incremental Discount (Case Study: Arman Airline Catering)

Flight catering is a complicated food service industry with the aim of supply and distribution services to the airline passengers. In this study, integrated supply, production and distribution model in airline food supply chain is presented with considering discount and the aim of minimizing costs. The costs include four components of delay, purchasing raw materials, material storage and transportation. Regarding purchasing raw materials, it is possible to use the incremental and overall discount in the model. All the existing models in the airline industry are addressed to the planning of factors under the control of airlines to face and reduce delay of flights. In the meantime, external factors such as catering and its effect on delays, is not yet noticed. In this study, for the first time, schedule of flight catering is considered and try to control and minimize delays caused by lack of timely delivery of food to the aircrafts. Proposed model is solved with Arman airline catering information and GAMS software. Results show that applying the proposed model leads to make zero delay cost for delivering foods to the airports which itself causes elimination of parts of aircraft delay which resulted by lack of timely catering services. Meanwhile, results show that %61.82 of total catering costs belongs to purchasing raw materials, %03.0 for material storage and %36/18 belongs to transportation of vehicles.
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