Development of An Optimal Routes Selection Model Considering Price Characteristics of Agricultural Products

Transportation and logistics of agricultural products have been one of the major interests of many researches. Most of researches have been limited to presuming these as a first dimensional process or considering only economic value of agricultural products at each stage of logistics. However, the particular characteristics of agricultural products, such as quality change during transportation or extensively scattered origins, require examining these problems as a whole system. Network model has been adopted to represent nodes, which stand for spatial location of demand and supply of agricultural products, and communication between these nodes. Based on network theory and advanced marketing potential function, an optimal routes selection model is developed. The model employed network simplex method for routes optimization. The application of the model focused on transportation network organization to reflect different market prices for different locations and resulted in optimum routes and profit improvement of the applied agricultural product.