Result: Purchase and Transportation Planning for Food Retailing

In this chapter, in order to demonstrate linear programming techniques given in the previous chapters by applying to a real-world decision-making problem, we consider purchase and transportation planning for food retailing in Japan and formulate a linear programming problem where the profit of a food retailer is maximized. The food retailer deals with vegetables and fruits which are purchased at the central wholesale markets in several cities and transports them by truck from each of the central wholesaler markets to the food retailer’s storehouse. Having examined the optimal solution to the formulated linear programming problem, in view of the recent global warming issue, a single-objective problem is reformulated as a multiobjective one. Furthermore, introducing the fuzzy goals of the decision maker, interactive fuzzy programming approaches are employed. Extensions to fuzzy stochastic multiobjective programming are also discussed.