The Study On Route Optimization In Cold Chain Logistic Distribution For Fresh Foods

The adoption of cold chain has enabled many companies rely on specialty by identifying transportation of temperature sensitive products as a niche market and thus making a significant impact on the macro-economies of countries.Although cold chain logistics industry is developing,Ghana still face a lot of problems and challenges such as insufficient infrastructure,poor management of distribution,improper scheduling of routes,agricultural products rotting,deterioration,lack of equipment for the preservation of agriculture products.All these have resulted into massive product losses and also huge economic losses to distribution Companies and the development of cold chain industry as a whole.Therefore,in order to make the company's agricultural products develop healthily and steadily,distribution cost of agricultural products must be strictly controlled and rationally selected.Also,the release of carbon emissions by the cold chain vehicles have been enormous and dilapidating to the environment,therefore achieving good routing for logistics distribution to reduce transport cost and reducing the emission of gases for cold chain will help achieve a win-win situation of economic and sustainable environment.In this research,the author's first objective is to identify routes with the minimum transport cost by the use of the greedy search method and Particle Swarm Optimization algorithms.In this objective,research cold chain logistics that considers Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem(CVRP)with traveling salesman and Minimization of transport cost at the same time.The two models'approach as stated earlier are used to solve for the problem.Secondly,the researcher examines quality management measures that control and monitor temperature abused foods to ensure safety and quality.Also,awareness will be taken to control safety and quality.Lastly,a traveling salesman problem which considers carbon emissions in the environment,is considered and the effect of distances on carbon emission is also established.The researcher's findings from the first objective showed optimal distances to be 22.6,10.25,21.2 after greedy search was used and an optimal cost of$2841.2175.Also,findings from Particle swarm showed that optimization stabilized at(317.1429)which is the individual fitness value and did not changed significantly for longer time even with the increase of the population size.Finally,an optimal transport cost of$1151.4287 was obtained.Again,findings from quality management practices and temperature variations of the company showed that Temperature at the Warehouse ranges from 10-11°C.Also results from the various measurement in table 5.4,revealed that the percentage of Brix from the depot was13.20%.Lastly,results from Travel salesman tour considered with carbon emissions revealed that values for the shortest tour was 55.6354km and its corresponding emission was 91.75kg thus signifying a positive relation between the two variables.Also,the shortest tour with its corresponding Carbon emission is 55.6354km:91.75kg.The major innovations of the study are:The Study proposes a new paradigm in the logistics industry of Ghana where a 3^rd party logistics company specifically cold chain logistics is studied and distance is optimized at a minimum transport cost.Another innovation point stems from the methods used in the cold chain industry located in developing country.The researcher used greedy search method and PSO to determine their optimal paths because the PSO has a stronger function extreme value optimization ability.It is more computationally efficient(uses a smaller number of function evaluations)as compared to other algorithms.It also appears that Particles swarm outperforms other algorithms with continuous design variables.Greedy algorithms run faster than dynamic programming in making locally best choice.Analysing the run time for greedy algorithms is generally much easier than other techniques.They are easier to implement and because of their simplicity,they are frequently straightforward and efficient compare to other algorithms.For genetic algorithms,it searches parallel from a population of points.Therefore,it has the ability to avoid being trapped in local optimal solution like traditional methods,which search from a single point.Lastly,much attention has not been paid on the study of Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem which simultaneously considers traveling Salesman and transport cost minimization using greedy search approach thus making it a novelty.Its application has only been on Capacitated location-Routing Problem,two-echelon vehicle routing problem arising in two-level transportation systems and A vehicle Routing Problem which considers a large neighbourhood based upon rescheduling selected customer visit using constraints programming technique.