Working Paper Branch and Bound Algorithms for Minimizing Maximum Lateness of Trucks at a Transshipment Terminal

This paper focuses on the scheduling of trucks at a transshipment terminal with a single gate. Trucks deliver or pick up a single type of items at the gate and, therefore, increase or decrease, respectively, the inventory level. Naturally, pick up trucks can be served only if the required amount of items is available in the inventory. We consider the problem to find a schedule for trucks such that the maximum lateness among all trucks is minimized. We develop properties of optimal solutions, lower bounds, and heuristic methods in order to find upper bounds. These are incorporated in four branch and bound algorithms which are based on fixing sequences of trucks in forward or backward direction in two different types of representations. By means of a computational study we compare these approaches to each other in order to show their efficiency.