Improving the Donations’ Delivery Process at the Food Bank of Bogotá: A Vehicle Routing Approach

Abstract

The Food Bank of Bogotá is a non-profit organization whose primary mission is to provide food aid to economically vulnerable people and others. One of its key operations is the distribution of food to over 600 beneficiaries. In this research, we present the design and implementation of a computer application that calculates the delivery schedule of the Food Bank vehicles. Firstly, the beneficiaries of the Food Bank are clustered into four delivery zones, and their orders are assigned to specific weeks of the month. Next, a variant of the Capacitated Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem (CPVRP) is solved with an open-source tool. Lastly, routes are assigned to days of the week depending on the traffic conditions. The numerical results showed significant improvements in terms of total time reduction with respect to the business-as-usual practice. This tool is essentially for the monthly planning of the distribution of routes. These routes eventually will need adjustments because of changes in the beneficiaries’ demand, traffic conditions, fleet availability, and so forth. At the time of writing, the model is being integrated with another application that records and tracks the orders in the Food Bank. The users of this application would handle the daily operation and will make manual adjustments if needed. Finally, we discuss the main limitations of the application, which lie primarily in the need to educate both the Food Bank staff and the beneficiaries’ management, who are accustomed to last-minute orders, very tight time windows, and reactive delivery schedules that are highly inefficient.