Probabilistic Tabu Search for the Cross-Docking Assignment Problem
Résumé
Cross-docking is a logistics strategy in which freight is unloaded from inbound vehicles and (almost) directly loaded into outbound vehicles, often without storage. The Cross-Docking Assignment Prob-lem (CDAP) uses a terminal (facility, depot or distribution center) to unload products incoming from origins and to reload these products into trucks outgoing to specific destinations. The goal is to find the assignment of the origins to the indoors and the destinations to the outdoors that minimizes the sum of distance traveled when moving products from indoors to outdoors while satisfying the capac-ity constraints of indoors and outdoors [3, 5]. Since CDAP is an NP-Hard optimization problem, we develop a Probabilistic Tabu Search heuristic with multiple neighborhood structures to solve it. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on a total of 50 benchmark instances from the literature. Computa-tional results disclose that the proposed tabu search method outperforms recent state-of-the-art ap-proaches. In particular, our approach is able to reach 46 best-known solutions and discover 3 new best known solutions.