A bi-objective model to minimize service and storage time at a cross dock facility

摘要

Cross-docking is a relatively new concept of warehousing with limited storage time to maximize the efficiency of transshipment of goods. 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 paper, we deal with the latter type of problem, and propose a bi-objective model to assign incoming and outgoing trucks to the inbound and outbound doors with two objectives: a) minimization of the total service time for all the trucks served at the facility, and b) minimization of the total storage time of the commodities transferred from the incoming to the outgoing trucks. Our approach can be considered as a relaxed version of the zero-inventory policy (Boysen, 2010) that avoids infeasibility issues of processing the required number of outbound trucks.