Multi-Objective Modeling of Scheduling and Routing Trucks in a Cross-Dock for Perishable Items

Supply chain management plays an important role in creating competitive advantages for companies. One of the most important factors in supply chain management is the control of physical flow for materials and products. Cross dock strategy is an effective way to synchronic control of materials flow, logistic costs, distribution operations, and tuning customer service level. Today s use of this strategy, to reduce inventory holdings and reduce the time spent in the supply chain is increasing. Perishable items supply chain is more complicated than many others. In this supply chain, changing the quality of items because of the nature of perishability is very important for customers, so distributors face a lot of logistical challenges. Distribution management of these products through the cross-dock center is very efficient for delivering items to customers with appropriate quality, and, at the right time and place. In this research, we provide a multi-objective mathematical model for truck scheduling and routing in a cross-dock for perishable items by considering the perishability rate based on distribution time and condition by two types of trucks that are effective on product quality in distribution. The objective functions are minimizing the cost of delivery, including transportation costs, the penalty costs of shortage, and perishable items in distribution time and the total spent time. The VRSP system is modeled as a mixed-integer non-linear program in GAMS and an NSGA-II algorithm is provided.