Food supply chain optimization – A hybrid approach

Abstract

The food sector is a very complex environment influenced by economics, business, industrial, technological, transportation, information, legal and other factors. These factors shape the level of the availability of food, the nature of food products and the delivery method. The efficient and timely distribution of food products is critical for supporting the demands of contemporary consumer market. Without optimal food distribution, modern societies will not survive and will not develop. This paper presents the concepts of hybrid approach to optimization of food supply chain management (FSCM). This approach combines the strengths of constraint logic programming (CLP) and mathematical programming (MP), which leads to a significant reduction in the optimization time and modeling of any type of constraints. Moreover, this paper presents the formal model for optimization of FSCM with different objective functions. Several computational experiments were performed for compare hybrid approach to MP-based approach.