Scheduling trucks and storage operations in a multiple-door cross-docking terminal considering multiple storage zones

Abstract

Cross-docking is a logistics process in which products are unloaded through receiving docks and then transferred to shipping docks with almost no storage in between. In this paper, a mixed integer linear programming model (MILP) is proposed to optimise the scheduling, storage, assignment and sequencing of trucks at receiving and shipping docks for a problem inspired from a multiple-door cross-dock facility of an industrial partner with multiple temporary storage zones. The multiple storage zones are separated and located in the centre of the cross-dock handling different types of products. The objective is to minimise the total tardiness of inbound and outbound trucks. A heuristic (H) is proposed to find an initial solution. Then, three meta-heuristics are developed, namely Random Search (RS), Tabu Search (TS) and Simulated Annealing (SA) to improve the scheduling of trucks in order to minimise the tardiness of inbound and outbound trucks. Experimental results indicate that the three meta-heuristics (RS, TS and SA) are able to find good quality results within reasonable computational times. Finally, since SA showed the best performance compared to RS and TS, it was chosen to be compared to the current manual method using discrete event simulation.