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Scheduling Trucks at Cross-Docking System of a Supply Chain

Darvishan, Aida | 2012

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  1. Type of Document: M.Sc. Thesis
  2. Language: Farsi
  3. Document No: 45259 (01)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Industrial Engineering
  6. Advisor(s): Akbari Jokar, Mohammad Reza
  7. Abstract:
  8. Cross-docking is an innovative logistic strategy which brings significant advantages in-cluding little or no inventory in the warehouse. In this concept, coordination between in-bound and outbound trucks is quite important. This research studies the scheduling prob-lem of inbound and outbound trucks considering a cross-dock system with multiple receiv-ing and shipping dock doors. Moreover, due to justifiability of all trucks to carry multiple product types, product assignment from inbound trucks to outbound trucks is determined simultaneous to scheduling. As an exact solution approach a MIP model is presented and since the problem is shown to be NP-hard, it can only be used to solve small scale prob-lems. To deal with medium and large scale problems, two meta-heuristic PSO and GA al-gorithms are developed. Besides, mentioning that the problem on the hand has never been studied in the literature, a heuristic method is proposed to compute the objective function within algorithms’ structures.
    The Taguchi method is used to reveal the best robustness of the algorithms. Even more, a heuristic local search procedure, using two different types of neighborhood structure, is presented to improve the performance of the algorithms. Thus, based on the pure algo-rithms and the ones which apply local search procedure using successively neighborhood structure type 1 and 2, six scenarios have been developed. Finally, performances of all the scenarios are compared through a proposed experimental design analysis. Results show that from aspect of applicability, the scenarios which are related to GA perform better than PSO ones and that the GA algorithm applying local search with neighborhood structure type 2 performs the best. Moreover, quality of algorithms solutions is compared against the exact solutions obtained. Again in this case, the GA algorithm applying local search with neighborhood structure type 2 outperforms others. Thus, it is quiet sensible to employ this algorithm as a suitable approximate approach
  9. Keywords:
  10. Logistics ; Scheduling ; Supply Chain ; Cross Docking

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