A food upcycling model by food bank collection-distribution networks

Ghahremani-Nahr, J, Kian, R ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8786-6349 and Ghaderi, A, 2025. A food upcycling model by food bank collection-distribution networks. Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, 101: 102247. ISSN 0038-0121

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Abstract

Nowadays, the collection and distribution of food products with high nutritional value and freshness for people in poverty has become a global problem due to financial, drought, or other crises. Food banks (FBs) are important entities that mitigate food waste by reusing surplus food at critical points in the food supply chain. This article investigates an FB network design problem for the collection and distribution of food items. An FB network comprises donors mapped from the food supply chain, FB itself, and beneficiaries mapped from charities. The problem addresses synchronous strategic, tactical, and operational decisions, including the location of FBs, the assignment of donors to main streams, the control of inventory, and the routing of vehicles in collection and distribution levels to optimize the amount of food reused. As the demand and supply of food items from charities and donors are uncertain, a robust fuzzy stochastic model is developed to model the problem with three objectives including cost, nutritional value, and freshness of food. An extensive numerical study compares these algorithms with respect to several criteria. The proposed novel MOGGWA heuristic showed superior performance and was ranked first by applying the TOPSIS multi-criteria decision-making method. The value of stochastic programming and the impact of the model on a real-size case study problem are shown, as well.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Socio-Economic Planning Sciences
Creators:	Ghahremani-Nahr, J., Kian, R. and Ghaderi, A.
Publisher:	Elsevier
Date:	October 2025
Volume:	101
ISSN:	0038-0121
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1016/j.seps.2025.102247 DOI 2385583 Other
Rights:	© 2025 The Author(s). This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Divisions:	Schools > Nottingham Business School
Record created by:	Jeremy Silvester
Date Added:	20 Jun 2025 15:05
Last Modified:	20 Jun 2025 15:05
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/53779

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