The multi-floor cross-dock door assignment problem: Rising challenges for the new trend in logistics industry

Abstract This paper is concerned with the multi-floor, cross-dock door assignment problem (MCDAP) to minimize the total material handling costs. We present a novel mixed-integer nonlinear programming model and a classic linearization form for the MCDAP. We use a combination of multi-start, genetic random-key, and very-large-scale neighborhood search (VLSN) as the diversification strategies for the solution perturbation method embedded within the critical event Tabu search to solve MCDAP. We will test the proposed algorithms on a set of 60 very-large sized instances with 150–300 loading doors, and 100–300 unloading doors that raise size of cost matrix up to 90,000 by 90,000.