Bi-objective multi-period vehicle routing for perishable goods delivery considering customer satisfaction.

Preserving the integrity, safety and freshness of perishables can improve customer satisfaction and enhance delivery firm's competitiveness. Since perishables will lose their nutritional value and freshness during delivery, carrying out efficient transportation is of vital importance. This paper studies a supplier that delivers perishable goods to customers in a multiple-time-period planning horizon while simultaneously considering transportation cost and customer satisfaction. The supplier must decide specific vehicle routes of the delivery task. In addition, time windows, which have not been addressed in previous bi-objective multiple-time-period studies, are considered in this situation. The perishable delivery problem is modeled as a bi-objective vehicle routing problem with multiple time periods, aiming to minimize the transportation costs and maximize customer satisfaction by minimizing the loss of perishable freshness. A combined VNS and SA metaheuristic algorithm based on the ε -constraint method with several improvements is developed to solve this problem. A Pareto frontier reflects the trade-off between transportation costs and customer satisfaction. The computational results on a series of randomly generated instances validate the model and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, and some managerial insights are proposed from sensitivity analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]