Agriculture & Food, Volume 6, 2018

Streszczenie: This paper presents an innovative desktop milk collection route simulation model. The simulation focuses on the development of an optimal routing plan for a designated fleet of articulated lorries (trucks) and purpose-built tankers used in the collection, transportation and varying seasonal delivery patterns of milk from farms to processors over a national road network vis-à-vis, the Irish road network. A brief background of the significant role that ever-evolving technology has had on the dairy industry is presented. Followed by an outline of the multi constituents that form the complex milk assembly process. We move on to describe a model which has been designed to robustly cater for the specific characteristics that uniquely occur within the Irish dairy industry. The research presented suggests the formulation of a paradigm to accommodate the dynamic nature of the Irish milk collection process. A modified adaptation of a more ubiquitous solution, that was devised to encompass a broad-spectrum approach tasked with the efficient solving of numerous variations of the well-known Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) across multiple environments, is implemented. Employing the widely used heuristic technique known as the large neighbourhood search (LNS) algorithm, a new model has been conceived and tested that allows for the formation of scheduled collection and delivery routes that can efficiently resolve routing problems that are distinctive to the dairy industry and principally those of the Irish industry. With issues such as Brexit now facing the Irish dairy industry this paper aims to put forward an efficient model to support those involved at various levels within the milk transportation sector of the industry. Furthermore, the model has been designed with the intention that future research can use this base model as a cornerstone for more in-depth research in the ever-evolving area of milk assembly.