A heuristic approach to the design of optimal cross-docking boxes
Multinational companies frequently work with manufacturers that receive large orders for different products (or product varieties: size, shape, color, texture, material), to serve thousands of different final destinations (e.g., shops) requesting a combination of different quantities of each product...
| Autores: | , , |
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| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2021 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) |
| Repositorio: | UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/354905 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://hdl.handle.net/2117/354905 https://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3109976 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Heuristic programming Business logistics Artificial intelligence Combinatorial optimization Heuristic algorithms Logistics Programació heurística Logística (Indústria) Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Intel·ligència artificial Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Aplicacions de la informàtica |
| Sumario: | Multinational companies frequently work with manufacturers that receive large orders for different products (or product varieties: size, shape, color, texture, material), to serve thousands of different final destinations (e.g., shops) requesting a combination of different quantities of each product. It is not the manufacturers’ task to create the individual shipments for each final destination. But manufacturers can deliver part of their production in so-called cross-docking boxes (or other containers) of a few+ (say, three) types, each type containing a given assortment, i.e., different quantities of different products. At a logistics center, the shipments for each destination are then made of cross-docking boxes plus additional “picking” units. The expensive part is the picking, since cross-docking boxes require little or no manipulation. The problem we solve in this paper is, given a large set of orders for each destination, to design the cross-docking box types in order to minimize picking. We formally define a variant of this problem and develop a heuristic method to solve it. Finally, we present extensive experimental results on a large set of real-world benchmarks proving that our approach gives high-quality solutions (optimal or near optimal) in a very limited amount of time. |
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