Integrating information technology and operational research in the management of milk collection

The dairy industry is an important part of the food sector and milk collection is a challenging logistics problem that had long been of interest to operational researchers. Advances in information technology (IT) greatly facilitate data collection, manipulation and presentation and these advances facilitate the building of decision support systems (DSS) to support logistics management in the milk collection sector. This paper discusses how a geographic information system (GIS) based DSS allows a scheduler interact with optimisation algorithms to plan milk collection routes. The paper goes on to discuss how such a DSS can be integrated with automatic data capture devices and database management systems to provide effective management of milk collection operations.