Journal of Operational Research and Its Applications ( Applied Mathematics ) - Lahijan Azad University

A considerable amount of perishable products especially in the food and agriculture is corrupted annually due to the lack of effective mechanism in the supply chain. So, in this study, we tried to improve these unfavorable conditions by designing an efficient supply chain network minimizing costs for perishable products. Due to lack of adequate researches in the field of perishable supply chain network design, this study can be considered as one of the basic research in this field. In order to analysis and verify the proposed model, a case study in Mazandaran province has been applied. Since the proposed model on a large scale problem is NP-hard, therefore, the meta-heuristic algorithms are developed to solve the problem. It should be noted that in order to compare the performance of these algorithms on the small size problems, the branch and bound method via Lingo software is used. Finally, conclusions and suggestions for future research are presented.