Development of an effective cost minimization model for food grain shipments

This paper makes an attempt to address the issue of food grain shipments taking a case of Indian food grain supply chain. The existing process of transportation and distribution has been represented as a four stage process. In this work only the first stage has been formulated as a bi-level nodal capacity network flow problem with linear model in the first level and a mixed integer non-linear model in the second level considering minimization of transportation costs. The model captures rail-road flexibility. Finally two variants of particle swarm optimization algorithms are used to solve the model and results are compared.