A cross-docking system is a kind of facility design for the purpose of enhancing the time efficiency of a distribution center. In this study, we attempt to consider a cross-docking system without temporary storage and obtain great system performance by addressing the scheduling problem of inbound and outbound trucks, in which the total operation time of trucks is minimized. In order to reduce computational efforts, three hybrid metaheuristic approaches based on particle swarm optimization, simulated annealing, and a variable neighborhood search are proposed. By the computational experiments, the three optimized approaches are analyzed and compared with each other. The experimental results show that all of these three approaches can obtain pretty good solutions, even in the large-scale examples. Moreover, one of these approaches—a hybrid metaheuristic with particle swarm optimization and a variable neighborhood search—can usually obtain the best solutions.
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