Strategic crossdocking with inventory and time window consideration

Abstract

Crossdocking is a flow-through distribution, moving products directly from inbound to outbound vehicles with limited or no storage in between. In this thesis, we investigate how to implement a crossdocking system with inventory and time window consideration efficiently and effectively. The problem we are facing is proven to be NP-Complete in the strong sense. The linear-programming package CPLEX reaches its limits of computational time and memory usage soon when solving such a complex problem. We propose several heuristic algorithms to tackle the problem, including Simulated Annealing and Tabu Search. And extensive experiments conducted show favorable results for our heuristic algorithms.