A Simulated Annealing Heuristic for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Cross-docking

Abstract

Cross-docking is a warehousing strategy that involves moving of products from pickup nodes to delivery nodes through cross-dock in a short amount of time. This study proposed a simulated annealing heuristic (SA) to solve the vehicle routing problem with cross-docking introduced by Lee et al. (2006). The objective of the problem is to determine the number of vehicles and the best vehicle routes that minimize the sum of the operational cost of vehicles and transportation cost. Computation results show that SA can obtain better results in terms of objective function value at a slightly longer computational time.