Integrated production and distribution planning for perishable food products

Certain types of food, such as catering foods, decay very rapidly. This paper investigates how the quality of such foods can be improved by shortening the time interval between production and delivery. To this end, we develop an approach that integrates short-term production and distribution planning in an iterative scheme. Further, an aggregation scheme is developed as the interface between the production scheduling and distribution problem. The production scheduling problem is solved through an MILP modeling approach which is based on a block planning formulation. Our implementation shows promising results, elaborated in a numerical investigation, which recollects the real settings of a catering company located in Denmark.