Production inventory routing problem incorporating perishability for perishable products

In the increasingly competitive environment, each link in the supply chain is seeking for saving costs, meeting further customer satisfaction, especially in the perishable product supply chains. We present an integrated mixed integer linear programming model for jointly optimizing production inventory routing problem considering perishability for perishable products (PPIRP). We characterize perishability through imposing maximum shelf-life on the time to store, ship and consume products after production, and considering value decrease of perishable products due to the deterioration. The objective is to minimize the total costs including production, inventory, and routing cost, as well as the value decrease. We conduct computational experiments to verify the effectiveness of the model. Computational results help us gain managerial insights on achieving economic benefits for the integrated perishable product supply chain.