Scheduling cross docking operations under full, partial and no information on inbound arrivals

Abstract

Cross docking is a logistic technique which seeks to reduce the inventory holding, order picking, transportation costs and delivery time. Little attention has been given to the transshipment operations inside a cross dock. In this article, we study the transshipment scheduling problem in a single receiving and a single shipping door cross dock under three scheduling policies: In the first policy, we assume to have complete information on the order of arrivals and the contents of all inbound trucks. The second and the third policies assume the availability of partial and no information on the sequence of upcoming trucks. An optimal graph based model is proposed for the full information case, and a polynomial time algorithm is given. Heuristics are developed for the other two cases. The comparison of the costs associated to each policy helps evaluating the value of information in cross dock scheduling problems.