Sustainable refrigerated food transport: searching energy efficient routes

Despite the growing importance of refrigerated food transportation and attention paid to the related sustainability issues, few studies have introduced energy efficiency to guide decision making at operational level. In this research, refrigeration loads are introduced when evaluating fuel consumption for palletized frozen food deliveries from a central refrigerated warehouse, in order to select the best route. In particular, infiltration loads during unloading operations are evaluated basing on the most recent models, as well as transmission loads both during travelling and stops at clients, taking into account changes of outdoor temperatures. A minimum fuel consumption multi-period optimisation model has been developed and solved by Constraint Programming and then applied to a local network of supermarkets. While the traditional minimum travel distance remains the best solution due to the greater impact of travel requirements on total fuel consumption with respect to refrigeration ones, a preferred direction to run the circuit has been highlighted, depending on the different outdoor temperature of time slots triggered during distribution.