Developing a lower bound and strong heuristics for a truck scheduling problem in a cross-docking center

Nowadays, with the economical worldwide developments, logistics have turned out to be a substantial issue and has its own specific importance with certain position. Hence, both declining time and decreasing costs of logistics are considered to be significant goals of the supply chain management. One of the procedures to attain these goals is using the cross-docking systems which has rarely been concerned by organizations despite its desirable performance. Besides, according to the recent related papers, utilizing both heuristics and metaheuristics to solve the problem is an interesting topic in this research area. So, in this paper, to find the optimal for receiving and shipping trucks sequence, we employ five metaheuristics along with hybrid one. Furthermore, two heuristics are firstly developed in this research area which generate better solutions in comparison with the previous ones proposed in the literature. Besides, Taguchi approach is employed to tune the parameters of algorithms. The results of the developed heuristics and metaheuristics are compared with each other and also with the results yielded by previous related works in terms of different criteria such as solution quality and computational run time. In addition, to probe the performance of the algorithms precisely, a new lower bound is developed.