Integrated harvest and farm-to-door distribution scheduling with postharvest quality deterioration for vegetable online retailing

Abstract

With the rise of vegetable online retailing in recent years, the fulfillment of vegetable online orders has been receiving more and more attention. This paper addresses an integrated optimization model for harvest and farm-to-door distribution scheduling for vegetable online retailing. Firstly, we capture the perishable property of vegetables, and model it as a quadratic postharvest quality deterioration function. Then, we incorporate the postharvest quality deterioration function into the integrated harvest and farm-to-door distribution scheduling and formulate it as a quadratic vehicle routing programming model with time windows. Next, we propose a genetic algorithm with adaptive operators (GAAO) to solve the model. Finally, we carry out numerical experiments to verify the performance of the proposed model and algorithm, and report the results of numerical experiments and sensitivity analyses.