Milk collection network design: location and configuration of small milk collection

Abstract

In developing countries, production is dominated by small farmers with limited resources such as inadequate storage, transportation and finance. Furthermore, the presence of many intermediaries between farmers and final consumers reduce the margins realised by the small farmers and force them to sell their product with lower price. All the above factors lead to food loss waste (FLW) at the farm level. For instance, in Tunisia, the amount of collected and industrialized raw milk presents 60% of total produced quantity. In addition, the rejected amount of milk is estimated to 18% of collected quantity, which correspond to 30% of produced amount, especially during the hot season. These challenges faced by the small farmers’ highlight the necessity for implementing resilient strategy to eliminate waste and improve logistic operation efficiency. In this context, we propose a location and configuration of small collection centers network by developing a door-to-door methodology to improve the milk collection activity. A mixed integer linear programming (MILP) was developed to design a strategic and tactical decisions. A real case study is proposed on the region of Sfax (Tunisia)with various scenarios of production. The proposed model gives an efficient solution for minimizing the milk loss and waste.