Cross-dock scheduling considering time windows and deadline for truck departures

Recent years have seen a great deal of interest in optimizing logistics and transforming systems. An important challenge in this regard is cross dock scheduling with several real-life limitations such as the deadline for both perishable and imperishable products. This study is a new cross-dock scheduling problem considering not only a time window but, also, for all shipping trucks, in this research area, the deadline is assumed by the presence of perishable products for the rst time. Based on these suppositions, a new mathematical model is developed. Last but not least a new hybrid metaheuristic is proposed by combining a recent nature-inspired metaheuristic called the Keshtel Algorithm (KA) and a well-known algorithm named Simulated Annealing (SA). The proposed hybrid algorithm is not only compared with its individual parts but some other well-known metaheuristic algorithms are also used. Finally, the performance of the proposed algorithm is validated by several experiments with dierent complexities and statistical analyses.