A Novel Mathematical Model for Cross Dock Open-Close Vehicle Routing Problem with Splitting

Cross docks play an important role in goods distribution. In most of the common models, the capacity of vehicles is not completely used as they assume that each node is met only by one vehicle. Also, due to high cost of purchasing vehicles with high capacity, rental vehicles are used in collecting section. In this paper, a novel mathematical model is presented in which, each node can be possibly visited by different vehicles (splitting). Besides, in the proposed model, existence of open routes in pickup section has been supposed. Then, one meta-heuristic method based on the simulation annealing algorithm with two different approaches has been developed. For testing the performance of the proposed algorithm, the obtained results compared with the exact answers in both small and large scales. The outcomes show that the algorithm works properly.