Optimizing the distribution of food based on the vogel method

Abstract

Currently, numerous people still suffer from hungry and food insecurity. To solve the problem of production and distribution of food, we firstly set up a quantitative examination on food system from four dimensions, including equitability, efficiency, stability, and sustainability. As we choose 2 to 4 indexes for each dimension, we applied entropy weight method to decide the weight of each index. Secondly, we used BP neural network by MATLAB to simulate the rising trend of population based on the data of population in recent years, and predicted the population until 2030, which is about 8.5 million. In the same way, we forecast that food yield will maintain at 1.63*109 litres approximately till 2030 in the whole world. With certain assumptions, we set a model about Transportation Problem, which help us optimize the food transportation system at present. We use the Vogel method to calculate the results and chose 9 ports for exporting countries and 10 ports for importing countries. After that, we calculate the minimum costs of transportation all over the world is $4979628112343. At the end of our paper, we make sensitively analysis, the result of which proves that our model has a good stability.