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Scheduling incoming and outgoing trucks at cross docking terminals to minimize the storage cost

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Abstract

Cross docking terminals allow companies to reduce storage and transportation costs in a supply chain. At these terminals, products of different types from incoming trucks are unloaded, sorted, and loaded to outgoing trucks for delivery. If the designated outgoing truck is not immediately available for some products, they are temporarily stocked in a small storage area available at the terminal.

This paper focuses on the operational activities at a cross docking terminal with two doors: one for incoming trucks and another one for outgoing trucks. We consider the truck scheduling problem with the objective to minimize the storage usage during the product transfer inside the terminal. Our interest in this problem is mainly theoretical. We show that it is NP-hard in the strong sense even if there are only two product types. For a special case with fixed subsequences of incoming and outgoing trucks, we propose a dynamic programming algorithm, which is the first polynomial algorithm for this case. The results of numerical tests of the algorithm on randomly generated instances are also presented.

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank all the referees for the constructive remarks which allowed him to significantly improve the presentation of the paper.

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  1. INRIA Bordeaux—Sud-Ouest, 200, avenue de la Vieille Tour, 33405, Talence, France

    Ruslan Sadykov

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  1. Ruslan Sadykov
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Correspondence to Ruslan Sadykov.

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Sadykov, R. Scheduling incoming and outgoing trucks at cross docking terminals to minimize the storage cost. Ann Oper Res 201, 423–440 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-012-1232-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-012-1232-0

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