A food bank network design examining food nutritional value and freshness: a multi objective robust fuzzy model

One main reason for food scarcity is its improper and uneven distribution amongst those who require aid. To overcome this issue, charities and food banks serve as the connection between beneficiaries and donors. They are mostly nonprofit organizations but they incur operational costs for storage and delivery of the donated food items. The donated food items are either canned and cold, or hot meals from over production of businesses; and therefore their freshness, inventory and shelf-life bring about additional operational challenges in distribution and logistics. The uncertainty of demand and supply is another challenge to overcome, which necessitates a robust plan. This article proposes a multi-objective mathematical programming model for a food bank network design to optimize the cost, food freshness and its nutritional value. A robust fuzzy counterpart of the model is developed together with three solution methods including -constraint, MOGWO and NSGA II. The MOGWO algorithm shows a better performance in our numerical experiment with large instances. Its application on a case study resulted in a supply network with lower cost, smaller fleet size and higher food quality, although less fresh distributed foods compared to the benchmark network. The trade-off between the cost and freshness of food is depicted here by examining shelf-life of products and vehicle capacity. The long lasting products incur less transportation cost due to compactness of packaging, and similarly, higher capacity vehicles lead to more cost efficient dispatch with longer routes which decrease the freshness of food. According to our numerical results, higher uncertainty rate in the network increases total cost, but also overall nutritional value of the distributed food over the network due to greater supply of food