Truck Scheduling Problem at a Cross-docking Facility

As a relatively new concept of warehousing with limited storage time to maximize the throughput, cross-docking plays a significant role in an increasing number of companies’ warehousing policies in today’s customer driven economy. Problems relating to cross-dock facilities can be categorized into two groups: a) problems that consider the facility as a node within a larger transportation network; and b) problems that focus on the operations of the facility (Boysen and Fliedner 2010). In this thesis, the latter type of problem is considered, and two truck scheduling models with handling time as a variable are proposed. In the first model, Just-in-time scheduling with a time window to evaluate the operation process is used. A memetic algorithm and a number of computational examples to show the advantage are also developed. In the second model, the total service time of trucks and the temporary storage time inside the facility are minimized using the function of handling time. A multi-objective memetic algorithm is proposed to solve this model. Finally, the limits of current models and the direction of future works are described