Abstract This paper addresses a vehicle scheduling problem encountered in the cold chain
logistics of the frozen food delivery industry. Unlike the single product delivery scenario, we
propose an optimization model that manages the delivery of a variety of products. In this scenario,
a set of customers make requests for a variety of frozen foods which are being loaded together.
The objective is to find the routes that represent the minimum delivery cost for a fleet of identical
vehicles that, departing from a depot, visiting all customers only once and returning to the depot.
The delivery cost includes the transportation cost, the cost of refrigeration, the penalty cost and
cargo damage cost based on the characteristics of different frozen food products. Apart from the
usual constraints of time windows and loading weight, the study also takes into account the
constraints of loading volume related to the unit volume of different frozen foods. We then
propose a Genetic Algorithm (GA) method for the model. Computational tests with real data from
a case validate the feasibility and rationality of the model and show the efficient combinations of
parameter values of the GA method.