Truck dock assignment problem with time windows and capacity constraint in transshipment network through crossdocks

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the over-constrained truck dock assignment problem with time windows and capacity constraint in trans-shipment network through crossdocks where the number of trucks exceeds the number of docks available, the capacity of the crossdock is limited, and where the objective is to minimize the total shipping distances. The problem is first formulated as an Integer Programming (IP) model, and then we propose a Tabu Search (TS) and a Genetic algorithms (GA) that utilize the IP constraints. Computational results are provided, showing that the heuristics perform better than the CPLEX Solver in both small-scale and large-scale test sets. Therefore, we conclude that the heuristic search approaches are efficient for the truck dock assignment problem. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.