Route Optimization: Addressing the Challenges of Fresh Produce Transport
- November 6, 2024
- 5 mins
The transport of fresh products presents a significant logistical challenge. Beyond the usual operational constraints, this sector must also meet additional imperatives: strict adherence to the cold chain, management of critical time slots, integration of returnable packaging collections, etc. To address these complex challenges, delivery route optimization is essential.
To achieve significant gains, optimizing fresh product routes requires a solution capable of precisely modeling all specific constraints, from time slots to vehicle capacities and collection management.
Kardinal’s tailored and dynamic approach, explored in this article, meets these complex operational challenges while providing flexibility, responsiveness, and performance to fresh logistics.
What is route optimization?
Route optimization involves determining the most efficient routes for a fleet of vehicles to complete a set of deliveries or tasks. It is a complex mathematical problem that requires balancing multiple objectives and constraints.
Route optimization solutions offer numerous benefits, including:
- Productivity gains and cost reduction: Optimizing routes significantly increases productivity while reducing operational costs by minimizing travel distances and better distributing resources.
- Improved service quality: Optimized routes ensure adherence to delivery windows, shorter intervention times, and increased responsiveness, leading to higher customer satisfaction.
- Reduced environmental impact: By minimizing empty miles and the number of vehicles, optimization lowers fuel consumption and emissions.
- Time savings for planners: Automation saves valuable time for planners, allowing them to focus on higher-value tasks.
To achieve these benefits, optimization solutions consider various factors: vehicle types, loading capacities, driver skills, driving time regulations, traffic conditions, and more.
What are the specific constraints of transporting fresh products?
Transporting fresh products presents particular challenges that must be considered when optimizing delivery routes. Here are the main constraints to integrate:
Volume and collections
- On average, 15 to 20 delivery points per route, with variations depending on geographic areas.
- Integration of collections (returns) with the management of containers (pallets, crates, rolls).
Vehicles and equipment
- Compliance with maximum payload limits.
- Use of refrigerated vehicles (chilled or frozen compartments).
- Consideration of electric or non-motorized vehicles (bicycles, etc.).
Traffic and access
- Compliance with Low Emission Zones (LEZ) and other access restrictions.
- Adaptation to traffic constraints during special events (e.g., major global sports event).
Human resources
- Ability to assign drivers dedicated to specific clients.
- Compliance with labor laws regarding working hours (weekly balancing, mandatory breaks).
Time slot management
- Strict or flexible adherence to time slots depending on clients.
- Consideration of variable delivery frequencies.
- Adaptation to different delivery times based on points of sale.
Optimizing delivery routes in fresh produce transportation requires a detailed modeling that incorporates all these operational and regulatory constraints. Only an advanced algorithmic approach can effectively meet this complex challenge.
Fresh produce transport: What solutions for truly relevant routes?
Optimizing delivery routes is crucial, situated at the forefront of the execution phase, though adjustments can be made along the way. This stage offers the most significant gains, both economically and in terms of service quality.
To ensure that the calculated routes are truly realistic, it’s essential to use a route optimization solution that considers all the specific constraints of refrigerated food transport. This is notably the case with Kardinal, whose solution offers numerous features.
Next-generation route optimization: a dynamic and tailored approach
Seamless integration
The optimization process can interface transparently with existing systems such as ERP, WMS, TMS, and DMS, without requiring a complete overhaul of the IT infrastructure. Kardinal’s route optimization solution is integrated into many market-leading software solutions like Hub One‘s DMS and Escher‘s platform dedicated to the postal sector.
Even without these tools, it is possible to work from simple files to initiate optimized routes.
Modeling specific constraints
Our internally developed optimization solver allows us to model any specific constraint with great flexibility, even the most complex ones. This capability enables us to integrate all the aforementioned constraints to accurately represent business challenges, including types of customers to deliver, available resources (internal or subcontractors), potential financial criteria, working hours, commercial preferences, and more.
🔎 Focus on maintaining cold chain in vehicles
Vehicles used for refrigerated transport often feature bi- or tri-temperature compartments, enabling simultaneous transportation of fresh, frozen, and dry products. Some vehicles can even convert a fresh compartment into a dry one and vice versa. Kardinal’s route optimization solution leverages these compartment activation or deactivation capabilities to create the most efficient routes possible.
Delivery time slots can be particularly critical in the food industry. For instance, some restaurateurs must receive their fresh produce deliveries very early in the morning, before a specific deadline. Their preparation operations begin as soon as the goods are received to be ready for lunch service.
As an illustration, the route below includes a delivery of fresh and dry products that must be completed before 8 a.m. Optimization algorithms have therefore placed this delivery first in the route to best meet the time slots while optimizing the distances traveled.
The system also incorporates contextual data such as traffic restrictions related to events like the 2024 Summer Games in Paris. With some zones being regulated, access is limited for certain types of vehicles. Despite these constraints, the algorithm manages to plan deliveries in these areas by adapting the routes accordingly.
The calculated routes are editable by operators if needed. This flexibility allows them to adjust specific delivery points between neighboring routes to account for specific constraints that may not have been modeled by the algorithm.
This simplified example illustrates the power of an optimization tool capable of integrating multiple operational, regulatory, and contextual constraints to produce realistic and optimized route plans.
Prioritized management of optimization objectives
Optimization objectives are crucial as they allow the user to define their business priorities, enabling the algorithm to produce the most relevant routes. Most tools offer the definition of a single aggregated objective, often a weighted average of several indicators.
However, this approach quickly reaches its limits when faced with the multi-criteria nature of real-world route optimization problems. It is rarely possible to summarize everything into a single indicator.
This is why Kardinal has opted for a prioritized and hierarchical management of objectives. Our lexicographic multi-criteria optimization algorithm does not just aggregate objectives but orders them by decreasing importance.
For fresh product deliveries, for example, a carrier might prioritize meeting delivery time slots as the first objective, then minimizing subcontracting costs, and finally optimizing the distances traveled.
With this flexible system, the user can easily set up the optimization to accurately reflect their business priorities. The most critical objectives are treated first, then the algorithm optimizes the following objectives in order without degrading the superior objectives. This fine-tuned and prioritized management of objectives allows our solution to tackle the most complex field challenges, producing routes that are perfectly aligned with the company’s strategy.
Intelligent traffic anticipation
Traffic congestion can have a major impact on maintaining the cold chain during the transport of fresh products. Traffic jams and slowdowns increase delivery times, jeopardizing the adherence to delivery time slots.
Therefore, it is crucial to effectively consider predictive traffic data when planning fresh product delivery routes. By using this data, it is possible to estimate the duration of each trip at any given time. This enables algorithms to optimize routes by avoiding congested roads during peak hours and making the most of off-peak periods to deliver in dense urban areas when it is more advantageous.
Such intelligent traffic anticipation ensures timely deliveries, maintaining the integrity of the cold chain, and enhancing overall operational efficiency.
Dynamic route adjustment
For the transport of fresh products, reactivity and adaptation to unforeseen events are crucial to ensure the integrity of the cold chain and adherence to delivery commitments.
Kardinal’s route optimization solution stands out for its ability to continue optimization even after the vehicles have departed. By leveraging data from drivers’ mobile applications, Kardinal continuously adjusts routes during execution.
This real-time optimization approach allows for the consideration of all unexpected events: absent customers, traffic disruptions due to accidents, etc. While these unforeseen events cannot be predicted during initial planning, Kardinal seamlessly integrates them on the fly using up-to-date traffic data.
This dynamic correction ensures timely deliveries, maintaining the integrity of the cold chain, and enhancing overall operational efficiency.
Furthermore, with our “Always-On” approach, any potential errors in data (weight, addresses, etc.) are dynamically corrected without the need to tediously restart calculations from scratch. This provides valuable real-time adaptability to unforeseen circumstances.
The system dynamically updates the estimated time of arrival (ETA) for each delivery point while suggesting optimized routes based on the evolving situation. This ensures that the routes remain efficient and realistic, offering true robustness against unexpected events.
Intelligent appointment scheduling for optimized deliveries
With a focus on customer service innovation and sustainability, Kardinal has developed an award-winning intelligent appointment scheduling solution for deliveries, recognized at the SITL 2024 exhibition.
The dual objective is to allow customers to book reliable delivery slots while ensuring these slots are economically and environmentally efficient for the carrier.
This feature can be integrated into an e-commerce website, offering customers available time slots that align with already planned routes. It can also be utilized by the carriers’ own appointment scheduling services.
The system analyzes orders and available resources over a 10 to 15-day horizon. For any new request, it calculates all viable slots that can be incorporated into feasible routes.
Beyond simple availability, the algorithm also evaluates the relative impact of each slot in terms of costs and CO2 emissions. This allows for dynamic pricing, charging or not charging certain slots based on their operational efficiency. The idea is to encourage customers, through these indicators, to choose the most economical and ecological slots for the carrier.
Once the appointment is booked, it is seamlessly integrated into Kardinal’s continuous route optimization process. The logic is reversed: instead of being constrained by fixed appointments, the system first creates optimal routes before opening the corresponding time slots.
This innovative approach to intelligent appointment scheduling enhances the customer experience with reliable deliveries while boosting operational performance for the carrier. This solution is especially relevant for the transport of fresh products, where adherence to time slots is crucial.
Facing the complex challenges of fresh produce transport, route optimization emerges as a major strategic lever. Kardinal’s dynamic and high-performance solution finely models operational constraints while integrating real-time data, achieving unparalleled levels of productivity, reliability, and adherence to the cold chain.
Compared to manual planning, this optimization approach promises up to 15% productivity gains. With its tailored modeling, prioritized objective management, and dynamic correction, Kardinal tackles the toughest challenges while meeting customer commitments. Optimization thus becomes a catalyst for performance and quality of service, now essential to stand out in this highly competitive sector and boost the fresh supply chain.
Continuous route optimization solution
