Tabu Search Robustness for Cross-dock and PI-Hub Scheduling Under Possible Internal Transportation Breakdowns
Résumé
Cross-docking, in its classical form, is a warehousing strategy which consists on unloading products from suppliers’ trucks and loading them into customers’ trucks directly or after being stored temporarily in the storage zone. In this paper, a tabu search meta-heuristic is proposed to solve the truck scheduling problem for both the classical cross-dock and the PI-hub. The objective is to minimize the total tardiness of both inbound and outbound trucks. Since in real world supply chain resources failures are possible, a robustness testing mechanism is presented to evaluate the robustness of the tabu search solutions by generating internal transportation resources breakdowns with different probabilities for both the classical cross-dock and the PI-hub. The impact of the internal transportation resources failure on the performance of the cross-dock and the PI-hub is compared. The proposed solving methods are tested on a case study instance inspired from a cross-dock of an industrial partner.