Title: Integrated scheduling and vehicle routing at cross-dock distribution centre: a simulated annealing approach
Authors: Shikhar Saxena; Rajesh Piplani
Addresses: Department of Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, Trivandrum, India ' School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
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.
DOI: 10.1504/IJISE.2023.132709
International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2023 Vol.44 No.4, pp.427 - 457
Received: 02 Jun 2021
Accepted: 23 Aug 2021
Published online: 09 Aug 2023 *