: Direct shipments and point to point dispatches impose large costs to the supply chain network; in this regard and in order to reduce costs middle warehouses were emerged as alternative solutions. Cross-dock as a kind of middle warehouses could propose a solution for distributing goods with low life time and high holding costs, while the main idea was not to hold any goods as inventory. Cross-dockingis a practice in the logistics of unloading materials from an incoming semi-trailer truck or railroad car and loading these materials directly into outbound trucks, trailers, or rail cars, with little or no storage in between. This may be done to change the type of conveyance, to sort material intended for different destinations, or to combine material from different origins into traort vehicles (or containers) with the same destination or similar destinations. Due to many advantages of utilizing of such facilities, it has soon became one of the most desirable middle warehouse practices, especially for distributing low life goods like diary, meat and etc. This study is based on middle warehouse context while considering vehicle routing, which is an emerging phenomena and tries to propose an applicable model close to real life in strategic and operational level by adopting logical assumptions. Considering different capacities for different vehicles, enforcing vehicles to visit each node once in every period, implementing zero inventory policy at cross-dock facilities, considering procurement costs as a way to distinct sellers and make purchasing decisions, considering single product/single period, having producers with limited production capacity, considering receiving and dispatching activities as distinct processes, enforcing soft time windows for each of the costumers and balancing ingoing/outgoing flow of goods in each of the warehouses are the logical assumptions and constraints which have been applied in this model. The objective function of the model is consists of costs associated with vehicle routing in receiving/dispatching processes, procurements, utilizing vehicles and payable penalties due to violation of costumers soft time windows. Due to nature of the problem (NP-hard) for solving the model, a Tabu Search algorithm was proposed which its performance was acceptable After solving the proposed Mixed-Integer Nonlinear programming, the solutions are analytically analyzed.
