Cross-docks scheduling with multiple doors using fuzzy approach

Abstract

One of the most important practices in logistics is Cross-Docking which sets its goals as inventory reduction and customer satisfaction increase. Customers receive goods through docks. Docks are responsible to provide a place for goods before being delivered to the customers. Then, these materials are directly loaded into outbound trucks with little or no storage in between to send to customers in the shortest possible time. This paper is mainly aimed at introducing a mixed integer, non-linear programming model to solve scheduling several cross-docking problems. The proposed model is highly facilitated to allocate the most optimal destinations to storage doors and truck scheduling in docks while selecting the collection and delivery routes. Using optimization approaches at uncertainty conditions is also of great importance. Mathematical programming techniques vividly fail to solve transportation problems that include fuzzy objective function coefficients. A fuzzy multi-objective linear programming model is proposed to solve the transportation decision-making with fuzzy objective function coefficients.