An Integrated Perishable Inventory Routing Problem with Consistent Driver Services and Deliver Fresh Products using Possibility and Necessity Measures

Abstract

To demonstrate the importance of customer satisfaction, one can mention a number of service providers that attempt to differentiate themselves in terms of their satisfied customers, witnessing high growth. In this paper, some factors such as driver consistent services and delivering fresh products that increase retailers' and customers’ satisfaction were considered in a Perishable Inventory Routing Problem (PIRP) under possibility and necessity classes of fuzzy uncertainty measures. In a typical Inventory Routing Problem (IRP), a distribution center delivers products to a set of customers through a limited time horizon and, simultaneously, makes a decision about inventory and routing to minimize the total cost. The proposed model was formulated as mixed-integer programming. Two types of consistent driver services were regarded for different kinds of customers including particular and typical customers. To investigate the validity of the model, the problem was solved at two values of possibility and necessity measures.