Routing Optimization in Distribution of Cold Chain Logistics

In recent years, cold chain logistics is becoming more and more important, which always guides the transportation of the perishable food or agricultural products to the designated locations with least time to keep them fresh. In this paper, we study the problem of routing in cold chain logistics distribution with the goal of minimizing the total cost. It is mainly composed of four parts: the cost of vehicles to be used, transportation cost, customer penalty cost and the cost of damage, reflecting the basic operation expenditures, total routing length, and customer satisfaction during transportation indirectly. Here, the cost of customer penalty is generated only when the delivery time of a product exceeds its given time window. We first formulate the problem as a constraint optimization problem, and then propose a CC-ant algorithm based on ant colony framework. Numerical experiments show that our routing method can provide a feasible transportation path with both less cost and less running time in comparison with existing work.