Vehicle Routing for Surplus Food in Nonprofit Organization

Abstract

Technology plays a significant role in effectively providing facilities to perform organizational tasks and making the organization more useful by allowing it to increase production. Technology also provides benefits to companies currently working in food delivery services. This thesis used the organization Ekram as a real case study of an issue of surplus food collection in Makkah city and aiming to enhance its current system and solve several key issues. Ekram is a non-profit organization that receives food from donors and distributes it to those in need. The organization has faced problems in the process of steering vehicles to different locations so the current system has a variety of problems in routing and finding the optimized routes to reach the destination. This study discussed Vehicle Routing Problems in the Ekram because the VRP is effective in enhancing time, distance, and the number of vehicles used, which can also impact the organization’s cost. The most significant challenge is that the vehicles have to consume minimal time and distance to reach the chosen location. This study provides essential information related to VRP. This study used a variety of techniques to resolve issues and provided the most crucial information related to the algorithms proposed to address this problem. This paper discussed the greedy search algorithm, the inter route heuristic neighborhood search algorithm, intra route Heuristic Neighborhood Search, and the tabu search. To resolve the critical issues within the organization, this study implemented the algorithms to generate essential findings. This research compared the results before and after applying the algorithms to the problem. The comparison results show that tabu search offered better results by a 57.34% reduction of the total time, total distance improvement by 46.9%, and the number of vehicles used by 43% in comparison to the present Ekram system.