The Truck Scheduling Problem at Crossdocking Terminals Exclusive versus Mixed Mode

摘要

In this paper we study the scheduling of the docking operations of trucks at a warehouse; each truck is either empty and needs to be loaded, or full and has to be unloaded (but not both). We focus on crossdocking, which is a recent warehouse concept that favors the transfers of as many incoming products as possible directly to outgoing trailers, without intermediate storage in the warehouse. We propose a time-indexed integer programming formulation for scheduling the loading and unloading of the trucks at the docks, and we distinguish between a so-called "mixed mode", in which some or all of the docks can be used both for loading as well as unloading, and an "exclusive mode", in which each dock is dedicated to only one of the two types of operations. Computational experiments are provided to compare the efficiency of the two modes.