Integrated Production-Transportation Planning for Supply Chain With Perishable Food and Shared Returnable Transport Items

Food supply chain (FSC) management has attracted increasing attention from academics and practitioners in recent years. Although the closed-loop FSC (CLFSC) with returnable transport items (RTIs) has many realistic applications, it is rarely studied. This paper studies a new production-transportation planning problem for a closed-loop perishable FSC with shared RTIs, in which the RTIs can be used by different manufacturers belonging to the same company. The problem consists of determining production, transportation, and inventory quantities for each period of a considered planning horizon to maximize the total profit of the whole supply chain. For the problem, we first formulate it as a mixed-integer linear program (MILP). To efficiently solve the NP-hard problem, we then develop a two-phase heuristic algorithm (TPHA). Experimental results of randomly generated instances show that the performance of the TPHA outperforms the direct use of a commercial solver CPLEX, the differential evolution algorithm, and column generation. Finally, the benefits of the shared RTI strategy and differential price strategy in a CLFSC are verified.