The food bank resource allocation problem
- PDF / 1,588,880 Bytes
- 21 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 21 Downloads / 197 Views
The food bank resource allocation problem J. Álvaro Gómez‑Pantoja1 · M. Angélica Salazar‑Aguilar1 · José Luis González‑Velarde2 Received: 26 November 2019 / Accepted: 3 August 2020 © Sociedad de Estadística e Investigación Operativa 2020
Abstract One of the global strategic areas in the fight against hunger is the one related to food banks. The mission of food banks is to provide food to people that are in extreme poverty and famine. However, food banks do not have enough resources to supply food to the needy. Hence, hard decisions have to be made every day to determine who will be served, what kind of products, and how many of them will be supplied. In this work, we introduce an optimization model for the Food Bank Resource Allocation Problem, which takes into account inventory management, purchases, product-beneficiary compatibilities, balanced nutrition, and priority of beneficiaries. We also propose an adaptive heuristic to solve large instances of this problem. The mathematical formulation and the proposed heuristic are evaluated over a large set of instances that have been randomly generated based on a real situation of a local food bank. Computational results reveal that our heuristic is able to produce good quality solutions in short computation times. Keywords Food banks · Humanitarian logistics · Food distribution · Resource allocation
* José Luis González‑Velarde [email protected] J. Álvaro Gómez‑Pantoja [email protected] M. Angélica Salazar‑Aguilar [email protected] 1
Graduate Program in Systems Engineering, Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, San Nicolás de los Garza, Mexico
2
Tecnologico de Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
J. Á. Gómez‑Pantoja et al.
1 Introduction Every year, the world population is increasing as well as the deforestation by human hands, which accelerates the erosion of land that could be used for growing food. In addition, the price of food products is so unstable that poor people cannot afford nutritious food. As a result, we have an alarming growth in the number of people who do not have access to adequate and balanced food. There are several articles in the literature that give figures on malnutrition and food poverty, showing that this problem is really alarming, and although some work has been done on this issue, a greater effort is still pending. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, between 2012 and 2014, at least 805 million people around the world suffered food insufficiency and hunger. Moreover, one in every seven people has a diet that does not provide the necessary daily energy (FAO et al 2012). According to Godfray et al. (2010) this problem represents an increasing challenge, since with population growth the competition for land and resources exploitation also grows, adversely affecting the ability to produce food. Reducing hunger requires the right combination of several factors, for example, increasing agricultural productivity, improving access to food supplies, and b
Data Loading...
