Multiple crossdocks with inventory and time windows

Crossdocking studies have mostly been concerned with the physical layout of a crossdock or on a single crossdock. In this work, we study a network of crossdocks taking into consideration delivery and pickup time windows, warehouse capacities and inventory-handling costs. Because of the complexity of the problem, local search techniques are developed and used with simulated annealing and tabu search heuristics. Extensive experiments were conducted and results show that the heuristics outperform CPLEX, providing solutions in realistic timescales. (c) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.