Inventory Routing Problem in Perishable Supply Chains: A Literature Review

Context: This paper presents a literature review of the Inventories Routing Problem (IRP) applied to supply chains of perishable products. Different approaches to solve this problem are identified and described in terms of structures, models and solution methods. Method: A systematic literature review is conducted searching in different bibliographic databases and selecting the most relevant studies within the period 2004 to 2017. The results are analyzed so as to propose a taxonomy to classify and compare the different approaches proposed to address this problem. Results: We identified that the majority of studies consider heuristic-based algorithms to solve the problem. Because of its computational complexity the methods resort to metaheuristics and mateheuristics combined with exact methods. Regarding the application to specific supply chains of perishable products, they refer mostly to processed foods, medicines, and human blood. The constraints that differentiate this problem from other types of IRP are useful life and deterioration. Conclusions: The conditions and particularities of the supply chain of perishables products imply the need to consider new variables, parameters, constraints and objective functions; in the reviewed studies it is not clearly defined the differences involved when considering the perishability of the products in the supply chain. Future research should take into account the multiple ways in which deterioration is carried out with factors such as temperature, light, oxygen, humidity and in some cases microorganisms. Also include in the models the cold chain, hygiene standards, air pollution, emissions of greenhouse gases, generation of waste, occupation of roads and other aspects related to City Logistics and Green Logistics.