Optimization of Large-Scale Distribution Center Location Selection in Fresh Produce Transportation

The transportation process of fresh food often experiences spoilage, leading to a negative impact on its freshness and sales. Although the existing logistics distribution centers can transport a large number of goods, they have poor timeliness, so they are not suitable for large-scale fresh food transportation. In order to ensure the freshness and sales of fresh food, it is necessary to establish multi-level logistics distribution centers, hence the location of distribution centers has become a key issue. Such facility location problems are challenging in both modeling and optimization, especially when facing thousands of communities in a city that is ubiquitous in China. In this paper, a large-scale multi-objective optimization model for distribution center location problem is formulated and solved by sparse multi-objective optimization evolutionary algorithms (sparse MOEAs). Experimental results on the formulated optimization model show that the center locations obtained by the state-of-the-art sparse MOEAs can effectively reduce the cost of logistics construction, optimize the loss in the transportation process, and improve the overall benefit.