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A Research on Dock Assignment and Truck Sequence in a Cross-docking System Considering the Unloading/Loading Sequences of Cargos

  

  1. School of Electromechanical Engineering, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou 510006, China
  • Online:2016-04-30 Published:2016-05-27

Abstract:

In a cross-docking system with a wide variety and small batches of cargos, the practical requirement of cargos′ unloading/loading sequences plays an important role in the optimization of dock assignment and truck sequence. Under this situation, a new scheduling model to minimize the makespan of cross-docking operations is proposed, and an improved particle swarm algorithm for the proposed model is designed to optimize the dock assignment and the truck sequence. Many numerical experiments are conducted on instances with different scales by using genetic algorithm, standard particle swarm algorithm and improved particle swarm algorithm. Computational results of the three algorithms are compared and it is shown that the proposed algorithm performs better in solution accuracy than standard particle swarm algorithm and genetic algorithm. Its computing time is shorter than that of genetic algorithm and slightly longer than that of standard particle swarm algorithm.

Key words: crossdocking, unloading/loading requirement, truck sequence, dock assignment, particle swarm algorithm