Methods of planning deliveries of food products to a trade network with the selection of suppliers and transport companies

The paper refers to planning deliveries of food products (especially those available in certain seasons) to the recipients: supermarket networks. The paper presents two approaches to solving problems of simultaneous selection of suppliers and transportation modes and construction of product flow schedules with these transportation modes. Linear mathematical models have been built for the presented solution approaches. The cost criterion has been taken into consideration in them. The following costs have been taken into account: purchase of products by individual recipients, transport services, storing of products supplied before the planned deadlines and penalties for delays in supply of products. Two solution approaches (used for transportation planning and selection of suppliers and selection of transportation modes) have been compared. The monolithic approach calls for simultaneous solutions for the problems of supplier selection and selection of transportation modes. In the alternative (hierarchical) solution approach, suppliers are selected first, and then transportation companies and their relevant transportation modes are selected. The results of computational experiments are used for comparison of the hierarchical and monolithic solution approaches.