Presenter(s)

Madeline Renee Mock

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Description

Many households are food insecure, meaning they lack access to a sufficient quantity of affordable and nutritious food. The Foodbank, located in Dayton, Ohio, is a private organization that works to combat food insecurity. The primary responsibility of the Foodbank is to serve as a central warehouse that collects, stores, and distributes nutritious food in the community. The goal of this project is to optimize the truck routes in order to reduce mileage and save operational cost for the Foodbank. This project focuses on the truck routes involving food collection. There are currently 51 active retailers that donate to the Foodbank regularly. These retailers are visited between 1 and 5 times per week, with many retailers receiving multiple visits per week. The Foodbank has 5 trucks that can run collection routes with each truck having a capacity of 10 pallets. The trucks are currently running 19 food collection routes per week totaling 967.28 miles. When the trucks are not being used for food collection, they can be used for mobile food pantries and deliveries to partner agencies. Therefore, The Foodbank is interested in reducing the number of food collection routes. This problem is formulated as a Vehicle Routing Problem. A spreadsheet solver that implements Large Neighborhood Search was used to create new routes. As a result, the number of routes was reduced to 17 per week and 707.32 miles per week. This 27% reduction in mileage results in a cost savings of 1,300 meals per week.

Publication Date

4-24-2019

Project Designation

Independent Research

Primary Advisor

Kellie R. Schneider

Primary Advisor's Department

Engineering Management Systems and Technology

Keywords

Stander Symposium project

Fighting Hunger In Dayton Through Operations Research

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