Location-Allocation and Scheduling of Inbound and Outbound Trucks in Multiple Cross-Dockings Considering Breakdown Trucks

This paper studies multiple cross-dockings where the loads are transferred from origins (suppliers) to destinations (customers) through crossdockingfacilities. Products are no longer stored in intermediate depots and incoming shipments are consolidated based on customer demandsand immediately delivered to them to their destinations. In this paper, each cross-docking has a covering radius that customers can be served byat least one cross-docking provided. In addition, this paper considers the breakdown of trucks. We present a two-stage model for the location ofcross-docking centers and scheduling inbound and outbound trucks in multiple cross-dockings. We work on minimizing the transportation costin a network by loading trucks in the supplier locations and route them to the customers via cross-docking facilities. The objective, in the firststage, is to minimize transportation cost of delivering products from suppliers to open cross-docks and cross-docks to the customers; in thesecond-stage, the objective is to minimize the make spans of open cross-dockings and the total weighted summation of completion time. Due tothe difficulty of obtaining the optimum solution to medium- and large-scale problems, we propose four types of metaheuristic algorithms, i.e.,genetic, simulated annealing, differential evolution, and hybrid algorithms. The result showed that simulated annealing is the best algorithmbetween the four algorithms

Keywords:

Cross-docking , Transhipment , Location of cross-docking centers , Metaheuristic