Harmony Search Implementation For Scheduling Of Trucks In A Cross-Docking System With Temporary Storage

Cross docking is a warehousing strategy that involves movement of material directly from the receiving dock to the shopping dock with a minimum dwell time in between. With cross docking,the product moves from receiving to storage to shipping with little(“warehouse time” no more than 12 hours) or no storage of product at the warehouse. And then products need to be distributed according to the requirement, seted the route for delivering,finally,sent to the assigned customer.By executing cross docking, the turnaround times for customer orders, inventory management cost, and warehouse space requirements are reduced. One of the objectives for corss docking systems is how well the trucks can be scheduled at the dock and how the items in receiving trucks can be allocated to the shipping trucks to optimize on some measure of system performance.Scheduling of trucks in a cross-docking system is a hard problem(NP). It is also the key point to influent the efficiency of distributing. Many scholars at home and abroad already have made a lot of investigations about Scheduling of cross-docking trucks, including genetic algorithm and tabu Search.This paper will apply a new heuristic optimization algorithm—harmony search(HS) to find the best sequence between the cross-docking trucking with temporary storage, make sure having the minimal products in the temporaty storage, and keep the overall cross-docking operation taking the shortest time.Aiming at the problems existing in scheduling of cross-docking trucks, this paper carried on the following work: make a selecting from virous cross docking models, meanwhile, set up the mathematical model of scheduling of cross docking trucks based on the objective function that completing cross docking operation need the time; in the view of the relation that total operation time of cross docking is equal with the number of products reserved in temporatary storage, design the algorithm about how many products from cross docking trucks do temporary storage reserve preparing for harmony search algorithm using; based on the model and algorithm established above, all kinds of value of harmony search need to set for comfirming search scope and solving scheduling of cross docking trucks.By using harmony search algorithm to solve scheduling of trucks in a cross-docking system with temporary storage, this paper obtain the result of scheduling of trucks and the number of products reservded in temporary storage.Through comparing the results of harmony search with complele enumeration method, the findings show that harmony search algorithm has a very good performation in search.