A novel dynamic genetic algorithm-based method for vehicle scheduling in cross docking systems with frequent unloading operation

•A genetic algorithm-based method for scheduling vehicles in cross docking.•Inbound vehicles are allowed to repeatedly enter and leave the dock for unloading.•The proposed method outperforms two well-known existing works in literature.•The proposed method yields the shorter delivery times of products to customers.

An important factor for efficiently managing the supply chain is to efficiently control the physical flow of the supply chain. For this purpose, many companies try to use efficient methods to increase customer satisfaction and reduce costs. Cross docking is a good method to reduce the warehouse space requirements, inventory management costs, and turnaround times for customer orders. This paper proposes a novel dynamic genetic algorithm-based method for scheduling vehicles in cross docking systems such that the total operation time is minimized. In this paper, it is assumed that a temporary storage is placed at the shipping dock and inbound vehicles are allowed to repeatedly enter and leave the dock to unload their products. In the proposed method of this paper two different kinds of chromosome for inbound and outbound trucks are proposed. In addition, some algorithms are proposed including initialization, operational time calculation, crossover and mutation for inbound and outbound trucks, independently. Moreover a dynamic approach is proposed for performing crossover and mutation operation in genetic algorithm. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm of this paper, various examples are provided and analyzed. The computational results reveal that the proposed algorithm of this paper performs better than two well-known works of literature in providing solutions with shorter operation time.

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