Study On Scheduling Of Truck Arrivals And Departures In Cross-docking Terminals

The cross-docking operation plays a significant role in supply chain logistics,especially in the situation of the rapid development of e-commerce,information systems and supply chain coordination.The cross-docking model which keeps low inventory and efficient transportation helps realize economic transportation.It becomes a very critical issue that how to make reasonable arrangements for the inbound/outbound truck arrivals/departures and related internal operations within the cross-docking center to help enterprises and the cross-docking center save costs and achieve cost-effective operations.This paper conducts an optimized decision-making research on the truck scheduling problem in a cross-docking center with a repacking workshop considering limited internal processing capacity of the cross-docking center and the diversity of product space,in order to achieve the economic goals for the enterprise.The arrival plan,departure plan of the inbound and outbound trucks and the related operations(repacking and storing,etc.)inside the cross-docking center shall be reasonably arranged.This study carries out some analysis on the special case of the considered problem by relaxing some assumptions.On the basis of the analysis results and the particular characteristics of the considered problem,this study designs several efficient heuristic algorithms to help solve the problem better and faster.Finally,the performances of the proposed heuristic algorithms in solving the considered problem are tested through a series of randomly generated instances.The main contributions and innovations of this study are summarized as follows:On the one hand,based on practical applications and existing literature,this thesis considers the cross-docking center with repacking workshop,product diversity,and destination-based product allocation mode.The above factors play key impacts on the contents allocation of vehicles and the internal operations of cross-docking terminals.The consideration of the above factors also increases the complexity of the studied problem,and the solving of the above problems has more important practical meaning.In addition,this article not only studies the cross-docking truck scheduling problem in general logistics,but also deeply discusses the cross-docking mode under the cold chain logistics,which is related to the cross-docking truck scheduling problem in a more special environment.On the other hand,this paper constructs the corresponding mixed integer linear programming model for each studied problem to obtain the optimal solutions.Additionally,due to the complexity of the considered problems and the requirements for high speed of solving,this research designs a variety of heuristic algorithms,which is based on the particular characteristics of the problems,to solve the problem efficiently.At the end of this study,it points out the future research directions that can be further developed on the cross-docking truck scheduling problem.