A hybrid Approach in Metaheuristics for a Cross-dock Scheduling Considering Time Windows and Deadline for Trucks Departure

Abstract

Recent years have envisaged a great deal of interest in optimizing of logistics and transforming systems. One of important challenges in this regard is the cross dock scheduling with several real-life limitations such as the deadline for both perishable and imperishable products. This study is a new cross-dock scheduling problem by not only considering a time window but also for all shipping trucks, the deadline is assumed by the presence of perishable products for the first time in this research area. Based on these suppositions, a new mathematical model is developed. The last but not the least is to propose a new hybrid metaheuristic by combining a recent nature-inspired metaheuristic called Keshtel Algorithm (KA) and a well-known algorithm named Simulated Annealing (SA). The proposed hybrid algorithm not only is compared with its individual ones but also some other well-known metaheuristic algorithms are used. Finally, the performance of the proposed algorithm is validated by several experiments with different complexities and statistical analyses.