Design and Optimization of a Regional Buffalo Milk Supply Chain: A Case Study

A feasibility study was carried out to assess the economic viability of a regional supply chain of buffalo milk mozzarella in Lombardy, Italy. The design and optimization of the supply chain required the solution of several combinatorial optimization problems at a strategic and tactical level: location, generalized assignment, transportation and inventory/routing. Some of them could be easily solved with a spreadsheet add-in, while others required mixed-integer programming solvers like glpsol and ILOG CPLEX.