Sustainable Design for a Bi-level Transportation-Location-Vehicle Routing Scheduling Problem in a Perishable Product Supply Chain

Today perishable products have a huge amount of daily demand of customers including fast-moving consumer goods, dairy products, fruits, vegetable, meats, etc. So, the importance of controlling environmental and social side-effects becomes clear in a customer-oriented logistic. This study is to design a three-stage supply chain, whose first level is a facility location problem attached to a transportation problem with lorry capacity limitation. The first problem joins to the vehicle routing scheduling problem via the location of distribution centers. The duration of the product distribution among stages should not exceed the product shelf life. Since in the aware communities consumers are promoted to buy products with lower carbon footprint on their carbon footprint of products label (CFP), besides minimizing the network cost, an objective function is used to minimize the fuel consumption and CO2 emission. To increase the customer satisfaction as the third objective, on-time delivery based on customer’s priority and due dates is considered. In the fourth objective function, the accident rate of drivers as social side-effects in a sustainable design is minimized. To tackle this multi-objective problem, the Torabi-Hassini (TH) method is implemented, in which the computational results validate its efficiency.