Abstract

Cross-docking is a logistics strategy which is widely used these days in different industries. Cross-docking takes place in a distribution docking centre and consists of trucks and dock doors on inbound and outbound sides.Products from suppliers get unloaded at inbound doors from incoming trucks, consolidated, transferred and loaded into outgoing trucks at outbound doors, with little or no storing them in between. We study two scenarios of cross-docking scheduling problem: scheduling inbound side with fixed outbound side scheduling and scheduling both inbound and outbound sides. In the former scenario, we introduce five mixed integer programming models with enhanced pre-processing and extensions to minimize the total number of tardy products. In the later scenario, we proposed new linear mixed integer programming models where transportation time between dock doors are considered. The objective in the second case is to minimize the maximum lateness of outgoing trucks. In both scenarios, we integrate the unloading order of shipments in incoming trucks into our models. Computational results show that taking advantage of that information helps improving the truck scheduling and assessing much more accurately the number of tardy products and lateness.