Abstract
One important factor in supply chain management is to efficiently control the supply chain flows. Due to its importance, many companies are trying to develop efficient methods to increase customer satisfaction and reduce costs. Cross-docking is considered a good method to reduce inventory and improve responsiveness. The Vehicle Routing Problem with Cross-Docking and Time Windows (VRP-CD-TW) consists on designing the minimum-cost set of routes to serve a given set of transportation requests while respecting constraints on vehicles capacity, customer time windows and using transfers on a cross-docking base. Each customer must be visited just once and mixed tours comprising pick-up and delivery stops are not allowed. For a given vehicle, the designed pick-up tour must precede its delivery tour. In this work, we model the VRP-CD-TW assuming that all feasible orders are known in advance. We present a new mixed integer program to model the VRP-CD-TW and reformulate it via Dantzig–Wolfe decomposition to later develop a column generation procedure. The proposed branch-and-price algorithm shows encouraging results on solving some Solomon-based instances.
Highlights
Cross-docking has emerged as an important and efficient goods transportation strategy.As a variation of the well-known vehicle routing problem (VRP), the VRP with Crossdocking (VRPCD) arises in a number of logistic planning contexts
The objective of the VRP-CD-TW consists of designing the minimum-cost set of routes to serve a given set of transportation requests while fulfilling constraints on vehicles capacity and customer time windows and using goods transfers on a cross-docking base
We study the VRP-CD-TW and propose a branchand-price algorithm for solving such a problem
Summary
Cross-docking has emerged as an important and efficient goods transportation strategy. The objective of the VRP-CD-TW consists of designing the minimum-cost set of routes to serve a given set of transportation requests while fulfilling constraints on vehicles capacity and customer time windows and using goods transfers on a cross-docking base. (2006) considered cross-docking from an operational viewpoint in order to find the optimal vehicle routing schedule. The authors researched on how to find the best truck docking or scheduling sequence for both inbound and outbound trucks to minimize total operation time when a storage buffer to hold items temporarily is located at the shipping dock. Liao et al (2010) presented a new taboo search (TS) algorithm that was proposed to obtain a good feasible solution for the problem. Boloori Arabani et al (2011) studied some meta-heuristics to find the best sequence of inbound and outbound trucks, so that the objective, minimizing the total operation time or makespan, can be satisfied. Iberoamerican Journal of Industrial Engineering, Florianópolis, SC, Brasil, v. 5, n. 10, p. 16-25, 2013. 17
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