ABSTRACT

Nowadays cross-docking operations play a significant role in the cold-chain logistics. This paper addresses the cold-chain cross-docking truck scheduling problem where two types of products, i.e. refrigerated and frozen ones, demand separate trucks and storage areas with distinct temperature settings during their storage and transportation. We present a mixed-integer linear programming model with the objective of minimising the total operational costs that consist of inbound truck arrival penalties for violating contracted time windows, product delivery tardiness penalties, inventory costs and outbound truck transportation costs. Due to the strong NP-hardness of the considered problem, we solve it in two phases where the inbound truck arrival schedule and the schedule of outbound truck departure together with product processing are produced, respectively. Four heuristic algorithms are proposed to generate complete solutions of the considered two-stage problem, which are the combinations of two solution frameworks for the first stage and two methods for the second stage. Computational experiments are carried out to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed heuristic algorithms in terms of the solution quality and running time, respectively.

摘要

如今，越库作业在冷链物流中发挥着重要作用。本文解决了冷链交叉对接卡车调度问题，其中两种类型的产品，即冷藏和冷冻产品，在存储和运输过程中需要具有不同温度设置的单独卡车和存储区域。我们提出了一个混合整数线性规划模型，其目标是最小化总运营成本，其中包括因违反合同时间窗口而导致的入站卡车到达罚款、产品交付延迟罚款、库存成本和出站卡车运输成本。由于所考虑的问题具有很强的 NP-hardness，我们分两个阶段来解决它，即产生入站卡车到达计划和出站卡车离开计划以及产品加工，分别。提出了四种启发式算法来生成所考虑的两阶段问题的完整解决方案，它们是第一阶段的两个解决方案框架和第二阶段的两种方法的组合。进行计算实验以分别验证所提出的启发式算法在解决方案质量和运行时间方面的有效性和效率。