Integrating Dock-Door Assignment and Vehicle Routing in Cross-Docking

• Main Author: Enderer, Furkan
• Format: Others
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/978429/1/Enderer_MSc_S2014.pdf; Enderer, Furkan <http://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/view/creators/Enderer=3AFurkan=3A=3A.html> (2014) Integrating Dock-Door Assignment and Vehicle Routing in Cross-Docking. Masters thesis, Concordia University.

Cross-docking is a logistic strategy in which products arrive at terminals, are handled and then shipped to the corresponding destinations. Cross-docking consists of unloading products from inbound trucks and loading these products directly into outbound trucks with little or no storage in-between. Cross-docking aims to reduce or eliminate inventory by achieving an efficient synchronization of unloading trucks, material handling and loading trucks. This thesis introduces an integrated dock-door assignment and vehicle routing problem that consists of assigning a set of origin points to inbound doors at the cross-dock, consolidating commodities in-between inbound and outbound doors, and routing vehicles from outbound doors to destination points. The objective is to minimize the sum of the material handling cost at the cross-dock and the transportation cost for routing the commodities to their destinations. Five mixed integer programming formulations are presented and computationally compared. A column generation algorithm based on a set partitioning formulation is developed to obtain lower bounds on the optimal solution value. In addition, a heuristic algorithm is used to obtain upper bounds. Computational experiments are performed to assess the performance of the proposed MIP formulations and solution algorithms on a set of randomly generated instances.