Copyright © 2012 Zhaowei Miao et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We study a multiple crossdocks problem with supplier and customer time windows, where any violation of time windows will incur a penalty cost and the flows through the crossdock are constrained by fixed transportation schedules and crossdock capacities. We prove this problem to be NP-hard in the strong sense and therefore focus on developing efficient heuristics. Based on the problem structure, we propose a hybrid genetic algorithm (HGA) integrating greedy technique and variable neighborhood search method to solve the problem. Extensive experiments under different scenarios were conducted, and results show that HGA outperforms CPLEX solver, providing solutions in realistic timescales.