A heuristic approach for short-term operations planning in a catering company

Certain types of food such as catering foods decay very rapidly. This paper investigates how the quality of such foods can be improved by shortening the time interval between production and delivery. To this end, we develop an approach which integrates short-term production and distribution planning in a novel iterative scheme. The production scheduling problem is solved through an MILP modeling approach which is based on a block planning formulation complemented by a heuristic simplification procedure. Our investigation was motivated by a catering company located in Denmark. The production configuration and the processes assumed in our numerical experiments reflect real settings from this company. First numerical results are reported which demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach.