Truck scheduling in a cross-dock system with multiple doors and uncertainty in availability of trucks

Aim of this study was investigating a truck scheduling problem with uncertainty in both inbound and outbound problems. Scheduling authorities at cross-dock should consider these uncertainties and propose a scheduling & sequencing plan which is robust against these uncertainties. As we know, trucks don’t necessarily assign to receiving or shipping doors and should wait a while till a proper dock door is free and ready to service. The objective of this study is to minimize these waiting times by proper assignment and sequencing trucks. This schedule should be ready before trucks enter the crossdock terminal and thus we must use expected arrival times of trucks. And since these expected arrival times may differ from real arrival times of trucks, scheduling should be performed in a way to include these differences. If the difference between real and expected arrival time of a truck is less than its waiting time, no difference is made to the scheduling. But if the lag time is greater than waiting time, the schedule would be inefficient. As a result, it’s necessary to schedule in a way that these waiting times be at most the size of difference between real and expected arrival times of trucks to make it useable and efficient. Moreover, this paper considers uncertainty in mathematical model of the problem by use of chance constraints to consider uncertainty and tackle it and also multi-product model and product assignment between inbound and outbound rucks.