Vehicle routing with cross-docking

Abstract

Over the past decade, cross-docking has emerged as an important material handling technology in transportation. A variation of the well-known Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), the Vehicle Routing Problem with Cross-Docking (VRPCD) arises in a number of logistics planning contexts. This paper addresses the VRPCD, where a set of homogeneous vehicles are used to transport products from the suppliers to the corresponding customers via a cross-dock. The products can be consolidated at the cross-dock but cannot be stored for very long because the cross-dock does not have longterm inventory-holding capabilities. The objective of the VRPCD is to minimize the total traveled distance while respecting time window constraints at the nodes and a time horizon for the whole transportation operation. In this paper, a mixed integer programming formulation for the VRPCD is proposed. A tabu search heuristic is embedded within an adaptive memory procedure to solve the problem. The proposed algorithm is implemented and tested on data sets provided by the Danish consultancy Transvision, and involving up to 200 pairs of nodes. Experimental results show that this algorithm can produce high quality solutions (less than 5% away from optimal solution values) within very short computational time.

Vehicle Routing in Multi-Echelon Distribution Systems with Cross-Docking: A Systematic Lexical-Metanarrative Analysis

“…However, no generalization to a multi-platform problem has been formulated. Although young, this problem presents some interesting works, that are not detailed here (mainly Wen et al, 2009;Liao et al, 2010;Tarantilis, 2012;Dondo & Cerdà, 2013, but a similar problem is proposed in Yang & Xiao, 2008). Another variant consists on allow pickup and deliveries on all nodes of the graph, but consider transshipment points as special nodes where the pickup and the delivery commodities are equal for each point (in nature and quantity) and freight needs to be first delivered to be then picked up.…”

“…Moreover, two other recent works make different classifications showing the difficulty to follow a unified lecture grid (Berbeglia et al, 2007;Parragh et al, 2008). An explicit multi-echelon variant of the PDP is the VRP with cross-docking operations, described in Wen et al (2009). Two types of vehicles are defined: one type make the delivery operations at a cross-docking platform and the other type is charged of picking up the freight and shipping it to customers.…”

Two phase genetic algorithm for vehicle routing and scheduling problem with cross-docking and time windows considering customer satisfaction

“…The proposed algorithm leads to better results. Wen et al (2009) considered same problem with consolidation which orders after pickup phase are consolidated at a cross-dock then immediately are delivered to customers. In consolidation phase, orders are unloaded from inbound trucks and reloaded to outbound trucks, while if a truck must deliver an order that picked it up itself, consolidation is not necessary.…”

“…Because of high needed computational time, we utilized a high performance computer and solved a real instance from a dataset introduced by wen et al (Wen et al 2009) There are two parameters for unloading and reloading products at the cross-dock including fix and variable time for each vehicle. Figure 4, confirms that the transportation cost will be increased by increasing of unloading and reloading time.…”

Road-based goods transportation: a survey of real-world logistics applications from 2000 to 2015

“…They performed their experiments on a 12-customer instance which was said to be representative of a typical route. Wen 20 et al [90] solved a VRP with cross-docking for the Danish consultancy Transvision. In this application identical vehicles are used to transport orders from suppliers to customers through a cross-dock.…”