The impact of food perishability issues in the vehicle routing problem

•We present a multi-objective formulation for the VRPTW dealing with perishability.•We study the impact of distribution scenarios in the cost-freshness trade-off.•An e-constraint method and a hybrid MOEA are implemented.•Customers with large time-windows can be served with fresher products.•Customers in clusters are easier to supply with fresher products.

Highly perishable food products can lose an important part of their value in the distribution process. We propose a novel multi-objective model that decouples the minimization of the distribution costs from the maximization of the freshness state of the delivered products. The main objective of the work is to examine the relation between distribution scenarios and the cost-freshness trade-off. Small size instances adapted from the vehicle routing problem with time windows are solved with an ∊∊-constraint method and for large size instances a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm is implemented. The computational experiments show the conflicting nature of the two objectives.