Interactive Inspection Routes Application for Economic and Food Safety

This paper describes an application aimed at improving the current state of enforcement in the areas of food safety and economic activities in Portugal. More specifically, the application focuses on a flexible and interactive approach to generate inspection routes, to be followed by surveillance brigades with the aim of verifying Economic Operators’ compliance to national and European legislation on economic and food safety. The problem is modeled as a Multi-Depot Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows, and the algorithmic approaches employed seek to maximize either the number of inspected Economic Operators or a utility function that takes into account the utility gained from inspecting each Economic Operator. The generated solutions are shown in an intuitive platform, where human operators can visualize the solutions details (including georeferenced locations in a map) and fully customize them on time by manually removing or adding Economic Operators to be targeted.