Vehicle routing with cross-docking in the supply chain

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 cross-docking into the vehicle routing problem. In the model, a set of identical vehicles are used to transport goods from supplies to retailers 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 a minimum sum of operational cost and transportation cost. A new tabu search (TS) algorithm is proposed to obtain a good feasible solution for the problem. Through extensive computational experiments, it is shown that the proposed TS algorithm can achieve better performance than an existing TS algorithm while using much less computation time. The average improvements are as high as 10–36% for different size of problems.