Optimizing the Delivery of Meals and Food Pantries to Seniors in Omaha, NE
Advisor Information
Fabio Torres Vitor
Presentation Type
Oral Presentation
Start Date
26-3-2021 12:00 AM
End Date
26-3-2021 12:00 AM
Abstract
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has put a stretch on numerous businesses around the globe. For organizations that offer essential needs, this resulted in an increase in demand for services and products they provide. For the Intercultural Senior Center (ISC) in Omaha, NE, its free meal and food pantry services for seniors aged 50 and older have seen a substantial increase in demand, mainly because of the financial challenges faced by many individuals during the pandemic. Furthermore, the majority of meals and food pantries have to be delivered to seniors’ houses, since they are required to self-isolate for their health and safety. Other than the limited resources for deliveries such as vehicles and drivers/volunteers, delivery routes are determined manually without any optimization. To help improve this process, this project creates an optimization tool to determine delivery routes more efficiently within the limit of available resources. This problem is modeled as a variant of the capacitated vehicle routing problem using integer programming. Due to the nature of the problem and the high number of customers to serve, no mathematical optimization software can solve this model within a reasonable amount of time. Therefore, this project implements a heuristic savings algorithm to find a good solution to the model. By creating this optimization tool, this project enables ISC to serve more seniors in the Omaha area, minimize its operating costs, and make better use of employees who currently plan delivery routes.
Optimizing the Delivery of Meals and Food Pantries to Seniors in Omaha, NE
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has put a stretch on numerous businesses around the globe. For organizations that offer essential needs, this resulted in an increase in demand for services and products they provide. For the Intercultural Senior Center (ISC) in Omaha, NE, its free meal and food pantry services for seniors aged 50 and older have seen a substantial increase in demand, mainly because of the financial challenges faced by many individuals during the pandemic. Furthermore, the majority of meals and food pantries have to be delivered to seniors’ houses, since they are required to self-isolate for their health and safety. Other than the limited resources for deliveries such as vehicles and drivers/volunteers, delivery routes are determined manually without any optimization. To help improve this process, this project creates an optimization tool to determine delivery routes more efficiently within the limit of available resources. This problem is modeled as a variant of the capacitated vehicle routing problem using integer programming. Due to the nature of the problem and the high number of customers to serve, no mathematical optimization software can solve this model within a reasonable amount of time. Therefore, this project implements a heuristic savings algorithm to find a good solution to the model. By creating this optimization tool, this project enables ISC to serve more seniors in the Omaha area, minimize its operating costs, and make better use of employees who currently plan delivery routes.
Additional Information (Optional)
I would like to present in the second session of the morning.