Perishable items such as dairy products, food and medicine, various vegetables, flowers and plants, ready-mix concrete, and blood packages typically have a limited shelf life from production to delivery and can deteriorate over time. To prevent such perishability, these types of products must be delivered to consumers promptly to ensure that the benefits of the producer and distributor are met. One effective factor in delivering various products to the consumer on time is selecting the optimal route for delivering goods or products, which is referred to as the problem of vehicle routing. Vehicle routing for distributing various goods and products is one of the practical issues in the field of research in operations that are very efficient in logistics planning. The objective of this problem is to determine the operational plan of the target vehicles with limited capacity for sending goods and products from the central warehouse depot to a group of consumers that are geographically dispersed in such a way that the number of required vehicles and travel costs are minimized. Considering that the issue mentioned is a very complex problem and it is not possible to find a high-quality answer with accurate methods in a short time for its large scale, the GAMS software has been used to solve this model on a smaller scale. Finally, to demonstrate the practical application of the proposed model in the real world, the distribution of products among customers in the Ports and Maritime Organization of Guilan Province (Bandar-e Anzali) has been studied. The computational results show that distributors can reduce their operational costs by using this approach.
