The Vehicle Routing Problem with Cross-Docking in the Supply Chain

• Main Authors: Yao-ming Lin, 林耀銘
• Other Authors: Ching-Jong Liao
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/09012572537950424854

碩士 === 國立臺灣科技大學 === 工業管理系 === 96 === Cross-docking is considered as an efficient method to control the inventory flow, which is essential in supply chain management. In this paper, we consider a model that integrates vehicle routing problem and cross-docking. In the model, a set of identical vehicles are used to transport the goods from supplies to customers through a cross-dock and the whole process must be completed in the planning horizon. Each supplier and retailer can be visited only once and the total quantity of goods in a vehicle must be less than its capacity. The objective of the problem is to determine the number of vehicles and a set of vehicle schedules with minimum sum of operational cost and transportation cost. Since the problem is known to be NP-hard, we propose a tabu search (TS) algorithm to obtain a good feasible solution for the problem. Extensive computational results show that the proposed TS algorithm achieves better performance than an existing TS algorithm while using much less computation time.