Scheduling the truck holdover recurrent dock cross-dock problem using robust meta-heuristics

We consider a cross-docking system in which there is no temporary storage and trucks are permissible not to load or unload all of their products but are held and come back to the dock to continue their tasks in case they are needed. Scheduling the trucks in such systems is a nondeterministic polynomial time-hard problem that motivates us to apply two well-known meta-heuristics-named genetic algorithm and electromagnetism-like algorithm for scheduling trucks with the objective of minimizing total flow time of the system, which is achieved through the best sequence of truck pairs. To attain the best robustness of these algorithms Taguchi’s robust design method is employed. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods especially for large-sized problems, various test problems are solved, and the computational results show that our proposed methods perform better than Yu (2002)’s methods.