 Integrated scheduling and vehicle routing at cross-dock distribution centre: a simulated annealing approachShikhar Saxena and Rajesh Piplani International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2023, vol. 44, issue 4, 427-457 Abstract: Cross-docking is a popular strategy for distributing products with short shelf-life that must be delivered within their pre-specified time windows to customers. Cross-docks receive shipments from suppliers which are stored in a temporary storage area before being consolidated and transferred to outbound vehicles for delivery to customers. This research tackles the joint problems of vehicle routing and scheduling at the cross-dock, along with product consolidation, by means of a mixed-integer programming model with the objective of minimising the total cost of operations. Our approach does not pre-cluster customers into zones and allows vehicles to deliver in less than truckload. To solve real-life sized problems, we develop simulated annealing algorithms which can solve the instances in 2-3 hours, achieving close to optimal solutions, making them suitable for decision support at cross-dock distribution centres, which process dozens of vehicles and deliver to hundreds of customers daily. Keywords: cross-docking; routing and scheduling; delivery window; meta-heuristic; product consolidation; simulated annealing. (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ids:ijisen:v:44:y:2023:i:4:p:427-457 Access Statistics for this article More articles in International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering from Inderscience Enterprises Ltd |
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