Integrated cross-dock door assignment and truck scheduling with handling times

Abstract

In a cross-dock, commodities are unloaded from incoming trucks, consolidated according to their destinations, and then loaded into outgoing trucks with little or no storage in between. In this paper, we address an integrated cross-dock door assignment and truck scheduling problem to simultaneously determine the assignment and scheduling of incoming trucks to inbound doors and outgoing trucks to outbound doors, with the objective of minimizing the total time to process all trucks. We consider handling times to be truckload and door dependent and to include unloading, transfer and loading times of commodities. We propose two mathematical programming formulations and two hybrid metaheuristics to solve the problem. We report the results of computational experiments to assess the performance of the formulations and algorithms on a set of benchmark instances.