MILP approaches to sustainable production and distribution of meal elements

This paper studies the production and distribution system forprofessionally prepared meals, in which a new innovative concept is applied. Theconcept aims to improve the sustainability of the system by distributing mealelements super-chilled in the conventional cold chain. Here, sustainabilitycomprises economic, environmental and social aspects. The impacts on andtrade-offs between the different dimensions of sustainability are discussed, andcombined with aspect of product quality. Furthermore, we identify the importantplanning decisions in relation to production and distribution and organisethese in a decision hierarchy. Based on these discussions, decision supportmodels based on mixed-integer linear programming are developed for the planningtasks on the tactical level, including decision-making on packaging options anddelivery structures. The resulting models can be used to support production anddistribution planning, and also evaluate the performance of and quantify thetrade-offs between the different sustainability dimensions.