Novel approach to optimize milk-run delivery: a case study

This article proposes a new approach to optimize a milk-run delivery in supply chain (SC) which was introduced by Zhou and Kelin (2011). These authors particularly formulated the mathematical model of SC total cost at operational level for milk-run delivery and used Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) to find out the results in one specific case study. Yet, the solution found by this Meta-Heuristics did not obtain optimal values. Hence, to improve the solution, the paper presents one new method namely Hybrid Ant Colony Optimization and Tabu Search (HAT). To qualify new method, Tabu Search (TS) is taken into account in testing stage. With the same data in the case study and random data, the new method outperforms the original and TS regarding SC total cost and milk-run distance.