A Sustainable Vehicle Routing Problem for Indian Agri-Food Supply Chain Network Design

The agri-food supply chain network design plays a significant role in the economy of the country. The existing traditional agri-food supply chain (AFSC) network in India is a vast supply chain which has been operating haphazardly in an unstructured manner. The system is basically controlled by various intermediaries; this is leading unsustainable and inefficient supply chain in terms of time and money. The most affecting factor in the agri-food supply chain goes in credit of the unorganized manner of transportation from the farmers to the nearest food hub (market) wherein, they sell their products. This process has been a major bottleneck in terms of profitability to the farmers wherein the transportation costs are the major contributor to the overall costs. In traditional Indian AFSC, geographically dispersed individual farmers bring their product into the market for selling. In this phenomenon, they have to pay higher transportation cost. Therefore, we propose the vehicle routing for the collection of products from farmers to the hub. A single period vehicle routing model is developed to form an optimum travel route incurring minimum costs and allowing a pool of products (from the farmers) supply to reach the destination hub. Genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) is used to solve the proposed mathematical model and validated on a practical case scenario of the central part of India.