Abstract:
Dairy milk has been an essential food supplement especially for kids, generated constant stream of revenues for dairy farmers, and enhanced community strength through a regional cooperative. One of the important upstream problems that affect production costs and quality of raw milk is a logistic planning between a diary collection center operated by a cooperative and farms. Since there is no centralize planning, each farm transports its raw milk independently using its own truck. As a result, the upstream dairy logistics suffers from inefficient transportation, heavy congestion at a diary collection center, and low quality milk resulted from a long elapsed time between milking and collecting. Therefore, we analyzed the transportation data of See-Kew Cooperative, located in Northeast region of Thailand, and modeled the problem as the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) to schedule the pick-up time of each farm. The data analysis shows that the utilization of trucks can be significantly improved by centralized planning and calculated managing delivery time window at the collection center. Furthermore, we implemented the sweep and 2OPT heuristics and illustrated that the total transportation costs can be 42.37% reduced.