Food grain rake allocation planning considering inventory and warehouse parameters – A model and application for India

This article presents the case of a food grain distribution organization in India and explores the inventory and warehouse parameters that are relevant in regional level allocation of food grain rakes. Three penalty factors namely rake penalty factor, capacity utilization penalty factor and weekly penalty factor are defined to represent the parameters identified. The article formulates a constraint programming model to minimize the sum of the three penalty factors, named total penalty. A tailor-made heuristic is designed to solve the model and a webserver-based Decision Support System (DSS) is also developed using the heuristic for rake allocation planning. The proposed heuristic is tested via computational experiments using historical data collected from the organization. The rake allocation plans generated by the heuristic are found to have lower total penalty value than the historical plans prepared by the organization. This establishes the superiority and applicability of the proposed heuristic based planning methodology.