The vehicle routing problem of fresh agricultural products is different from ordinary goods due to their perishability.Therefore,we are concerned with the impact of the decaying factor on the total distribution cost and delivery routes when delivering multiple fresh agricultural products simultaneously.Based on the fact that customers often want to receive products within the expected service times,this paper proposes a multi-objective VRP optimization model for multiple fresh products to minimize both transportation costs and variance of loss quantity of fresh agricultural product.An ant colony algorithm is proposed and implemented on MATLAB to solve a given VRP problem.The impact of different exponential decaying rates and weight coefficients on the total distribution cost and the variance of loss quantity are discussed to draw managerial insights.Results indicate that suppliers need to sacrifice some benefits to improve customer satisfaction.
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