A New Location and Routing Model for Cross-Docking of Fresh Produce

Abstract

Traditional fresh produce logistics involve long transportation times and high loss rates. Cross-docking systems can significantly improve these issues but bring the challenge of mid-term planning in which vehicles have to be synchronized promptly at the selected cross-docks. This study proposes a new location and routing model for the cross-docking of fresh produce. Exact solutions of small-scale cases show that the model can greatly reduce the transportation time and loss rate. For real-world, large-scale cases, a greedy and biogeography-based optimization algorithm (G-BBO) is devised and tested to obtain near-optimal solutions within a reasonable time.