A Branch-and-price Method for the Vehicle Routing problem with Cross-docking and Time Windows

One important factor in supply chain management is to efficiently control the supply chain flows. Due to its importance, many companies are trying to develop efficient methods to increase customer satisfaction and reduce costs. Cross-docking is considered a good method to reduce inventory and improv...

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Detalhes bibliográficos
Autor: Dondo, Rodolfo Gabriel
Formato: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2013
País:Argentina
Recursos:Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas
Repositorio:CONICET Digital (CONICET)
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:ri.conicet.gov.ar:11336/8606
Acesso em linha:http://hdl.handle.net/11336/8606
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palavra-chave:Supply-chain management
Cross-docking
Vehicle routing
Columns generation.
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/2.4
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/2
Descrição
Resumo:One important factor in supply chain management is to efficiently control the supply chain flows. Due to its importance, many companies are trying to develop efficient methods to increase customer satisfaction and reduce costs. Cross-docking is considered a good method to reduce inventory and improve responsiveness. The Vehicle Routing Problem with Cross-Docking and Time Windows (VRP-CD-TW) consists on designing the minimum-cost set of routes to serve a given set of transportation requests while respecting constraints on vehicles capacity, customer time windows and using transfers on a cross-docking base. Each customer must be visited just once and mixed tours comprising pick-up and delivery stops are not allowed. For a given vehicle, the designed pick-up tour must precede its delivery tour. In this work, we model the VRP-CD-TW assuming that all feasible orders are known in advance. We present a new mixed integer program to model the VRP-CD-TW and reformulate it via Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition to later develop a column generation procedure. The proposed branch-and-price algorithm shows encouraging results on solving some Solomon-based instances.