Information Science & Engineering
LIU Weiwei, JIANG Shan, QI Shuo, WANG Yingchun
[Objective]High-value agricultural products such as precious medicinal materials and organic fruits generally have requirements for high-quality control and preservation and usually require initial processing before entering the market circulation. Therefore, the location of the initial processing center plays an important coordinating role in balancing the dispersed rural procurement logistics on the production end and the urban distribution logistics with dense distribution points. Given the common characteristics of poor coordination between rural procurement logistics and urban distribution logistics and a high proportion of transportation costs for high-value agricultural products, how to reduce costs and increase efficiency while ensuring customer satisfaction is a key issue that urgently needs to be addressed in the location-path planning of high-value agricultural products. [Methods]A two-stage logistics location-path planning model was proposed with the goals of minimizing total cost and maximizing customer satisfaction. The first stage focused on the location of the drying center, considering construction costs, transportation convenience, service radiation range, etc., to construct a location model and optimize the initial processing center location that matches the Chinese herbal medicine production area and users' locations. In the second stage, logistics transportation paths were planned depending on the selected initial processing center location, with vehicle capacity, speed, and time windows taken as constraints. A multi-objective path planning model was constructed by integrating transportation, penalties, cargo damage costs, and customer satisfaction. To solve the above model, particle swarm algorithm, differential evolution concept, and population evolution factors were integrated into the bacterial foraging algorithm, and a hybrid multi-objective bacterial foraging optimization-niche multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOBFO-NMOPSO) algorithm was proposed for multi-objective optimization. The designed algorithm improved solution accuracy by introducing niche multi-objective particle swarm optimization (NMOPSO). Differential evolution was introduced in replication operations to preserve population diversity. Population evolution factors were introduced into migration operations to improve the convergence speed of the algorithm. For the verification of the effectiveness of the model and algorithm, the proposed MOBFO-NMOPSO algorithm was compared with nondominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II), multi-objective bacterial foraging optimization (MOBFO), NMOPSO, grey wolf optimizer with estimation of distribution algorithms (GWOEDA), genetic algorithm (GA), and other algorithms, which verified the advantages of the proposed algorithm in solving performance and speed. Then, with the actual data of S enterprise's Chinese herbal medicine supply chain as a research example, the two-stage location-path planning problem was comprehensively solved by considering the construction cost of the drying center, vehicle transportation cost, time penalty cost, and cargo damage cost. [Results]The simulation results show that the optimized transportation cost of the enterprise is reduced by 10.26%, and customer satisfaction is improved by 44.84%, which verifies the effectiveness of the model in solving high-value agricultural product logistics planning problems. Finally, considering the quantity of Chinese herbal medicine production areas, logistics costs, and customer satisfaction, actual logistics path solutions were designed for S enterprise's Chinese herbal medicine supply chain, taking into account different extreme and compromise solutions, for the enterprise to choose from. [Conclusion]The two-stage location-path planning model and the improved MOBFO-NMOPSO algorithm constructed in this study can effectively enhance the competitiveness of the supply chain by reducing the total cost of the supply chain, stabilize the supply-demand cooperation relationship by improving customer satisfaction, and effectively promote the coordinated and steady development of the supply chain of high-value agricultural products by constructing a two-stage logistics planning system to improve the operation efficiency of high-value agricultural products.