Novel model and kernel search heuristic for multi-period closed-loop food supply chain planning with returnable transport items

Abstract

Closed-loop supply chain (CLSC) is of utmost importance to sustainable development and has received increasing attention in recent decades. However, food CLSC with returnable transport items (RTIs) has been rarely studied although its growing applications in practice. This paper aims to investigate a multi-period CLSC planning problem that coordinates the flows of perishable food products and RTIs considering food quality. The objective is to maximise the total profit of the holistic supply chain over a finite planning horizon. To this end, a novel mixed integer linear programming model is first formulated. As the problem is proven NP-hard, an improved kernel search-based heuristic is then developed. A real case study deriving from a food manufacturer in China shows the applicability of the proposed model and method. The results indicate that the manufacturer’s profit can be improved by more than 10% with our method. Numerical experiments on randomly generated instances demonstrate that the proposed heuristic can yield high-quality solutions with much less computation time compared with the commercial solver CPLEX and an existing heuristic.

Keywords:

• closed-loop food supply chain
• perishable food
• returnable transport item
• mixed integer linear programming
• kernel search

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially supported by the Cai Yuanpei Program between the French Ministries of Foreign and European Affairs and Higher Education and Research and the Chinese Ministry of Education [grant number 34644SB]; and by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 71471145 and 71871183].