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An Approach for Creation of Logistics Management System for Food Banks Based on Reinforcement Learning

Published: 28 July 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Food loss has become a serious problem in recent years, especially in developed countries including Japan. Food welfare organizations called Food Banks which distribute still-edible food to needy people have been active in Japan. Here, we sought to develop a logistics management system for the food banks to improve the efficiency of their food delivery. We propose a method to optimize the food delivery schedule of food banks by means of a reinforcement learning algorithm. In our proposed algorithm, an agent aims to learn the policy for delivering food at the lowest cost. We performed computer simulations to evaluate the validity of the proposed method, and the results demonstrated that the agent could acquire the optimal policy in a small virtual environment in many cases.

References

[1]
Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF), FY2019 Summary of the Annual Report on Food, Agriculture and Rural Areas in Japan, 2020. Available online: https://www.maff.go.jp/e/data/publish/attach/pdf/index-177.pdf (accessed on 24 September 2020).
[2]
Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW), Summary Report of Comprehensive Survey of Living Conditions 2016, 2017. Available online: https://www.mhlw.go.jp/english/database/db-hss/dl/report_gaikyo_2016.pdf (accessed on 25 September 2020).
[3]
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Poverty rate (OECD Data). Available online: https://data.oecd.org/inequality/poverty-rate.htm (accessed on 25 September 2020).
[4]
Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF), Outline of Activities of Food Bank Organizations (in Japanese), 2020. Available online: https://www.maff.go.jp/j/shokusan/recycle/syoku_loss/attach/pdf/foodbank-49.pdf (accessed on 24 September 2020)
[5]
Feeding America, Our Work. Available online: https://www.feedingamerica.org/our-work/food-bank-network (accessed on 25 September 2020).
[6]
The Distribution Economics Institute of Japan (DEIJ), FY2019 Fact-finding Survey of Food Banks (in Japanese), 2020. Available online: https://www.dei.or.jp/research/research08/data/research08_05_data018.pdf (accessed on 24 September 2020).
[7]
Faharani, R.Z.; Rezapour, S; Kardar, L. Logistics Operations and Management: Concepts and Models, Elsevier: Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2011.
[8]
Sutton, R.S.; Barto, A.G. Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning series); A Bradford Book, The MIT Press: London, England, 1998.
[9]
Wright, A.H. Genetic Algorithms for Real Parameter Optimization. In Foundations of Genetic Algorithms; Elsevier: Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1991; Volume 1, pp. 205-218.

Cited By

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  • (2022)Optimizing Food Allocation in Food Banks with Multi-agent Deep Reinforcement Learning2022 International Conference on Technologies and Applications of Artificial Intelligence (TAAI)10.1109/TAAI57707.2022.00045(203-208)Online publication date: Dec-2022

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ICISS '21: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Information Science and Systems
March 2021
166 pages
ISBN:9781450389136
DOI:10.1145/3459955
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 28 July 2021

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Author Tags

  1. Food Bank
  2. Food delivery schedule optimization
  3. Reinforcement learning

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  • (2022)Optimizing Food Allocation in Food Banks with Multi-agent Deep Reinforcement Learning2022 International Conference on Technologies and Applications of Artificial Intelligence (TAAI)10.1109/TAAI57707.2022.00045(203-208)Online publication date: Dec-2022

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