Advances in Truck Scheduling at a Cross Dock Facility

In this paper the authors deal with the scheduling of inbound and outbound trucks to the available inbound and outbound doors at a cross dock facility. They assume that all trucks served at the facility need to meet several deadlines for deliveries and pick-ups and thus request a departure time window from the facility, penalizing the facility operator, on a unit of time basis, if that deadline is not met. To solve the resulting problem with reasonable computational effort, a memetic algorithm is developed and a number of computational examples show the efficiency of the proposed solution algorithm and the advantages of scheduling inbound and outbound trucks simultaneously, as opposed to sequentially. Advances in Truck Scheduling at a Cross Dock Facility