| Food quality deteriorates continuously over time at a speed depending on the storage temperature, and therefore they have to be stored in low temperature to prolong the shelf life, increasing the storage cost significantly. In this thesis, we study a distribution problem in which a temperature controlled warehouse is responsible for supplying a dairy product, using a fleet of homogenous capacitated vehicles, to multiple customers with minimum quality requirements and delivery time windows. The objective is minimizing the sum of the energy cost at the warehouse to maintain the storage temperature low and the transportation cost to deliver the product. Decisions include the storage temperature at the warehouse and the routing of vehicles among customers. We formulate the optimal distribution problem as a mathematical model, and solve it in various scenarios by changing environmental temperature, quality requirements and delivery time windows imposed by customers, energy cost, and transportation cost. |
