Colloquium
The Food Supply Chain and Public Transport Usages; can the Public Network be used to Optimize the Food Supply Chain?
By Koen Veenenbos (the Netherlands)
This thesis focusses on improving the food supply chain using current public transport networks. The five largest supermarket chains (Aldi, Lidl, Netto, Rewe, and Edeka) in the area around Berlin were used as study case. The gathered data was all open source and came from Open Street Map and governmental institutions.
First, the food demand per region was calculated by using the average food demand per person per day multiplied by the number of inhabitants of an assessment test area. Second, this regional food demand was spread out over the supermarkets located in corresponding area by using the number of square metres of the supermarkets. With an extended network analysis, the delivery routes from distribution centre to supermarket were determined. This resulted in the number of rides needed per supermarket chain. To deliver all the food, while only using regular trucks, 508 rides from the distribution centres must be made.
Afterwards, the same strategy was carried out, but this time bus routes were used as delivery routes instead of normal roads. Also, the capacity of the delivery vehicle was changed, because the public transport vehicle has two purposes (person and food transport). In total 78% of the distribution centres and 72% of the supermarkets is found to be reachable while using bus routes. Because the lower capacity of the delivery by bus, it will take 1321 rides to deliver all the supplies. Nevertheless, these results show that almost 70% of the food can be delivered by using public transport routes. Future studies should be focussing on the design of the buses. The Vehicles need adaptation in order to optimally transport both freight and persons.
Overall, this thesis is a first step in investigating the possibilities of using the current public transport network to improve the food supply system. It shows that the public transport network has great potential in completing these two tasks.
This thesis focusses on improving the food supply chain using current public transport networks. The five largest supermarket chains (Aldi, Lidl, Netto, Rewe, and Edeka) in the area around Berlin were used as study case. The gathered data was all open source and came from Open Street Map and governmental institutions.
First, the food demand per region was calculated by using the average food demand per person per day multiplied by the number of inhabitants of an assessment test area. Second, this regional food demand was spread out over the supermarkets located in corresponding area by using the number of square metres of the supermarkets. With an extended network analysis, the delivery routes from distribution centre to supermarket were determined. This resulted in the number of rides needed per supermarket chain. To deliver all the food, while only using regular trucks, 508 rides from the distribution centres must be made.
Afterwards, the same strategy was carried out, but this time bus routes were used as delivery routes instead of normal roads. Also, the capacity of the delivery vehicle was changed, because the public transport vehicle has two purposes (person and food transport). In total 78% of the distribution centres and 72% of the supermarkets is found to be reachable while using bus routes. Because the lower capacity of the delivery by bus, it will take 1321 rides to deliver all the supplies. Nevertheless, these results show that almost 70% of the food can be delivered by using public transport routes. Future studies should be focussing on the design of the buses. The Vehicles need adaptation in order to optimally transport both freight and persons.
Overall, this thesis is a first step in investigating the possibilities of using the current public transport network to improve the food supply system. It shows that the public transport network has great potential in completing these two tasks.