Real-Time Trailer Scheduling for Crossdock Operations

Abstract

Crossdocks play an important role in supply chain operations. Due to the need to decrease transportation lead time to coordinate with other supply chain activities such as just-in-time, make-to-order, or merge-in-transit strategies, shortening the total transfer time at crossdocks is increasingly important. In this research, we use real-time information about freight transferring within a crossdock to schedule waiting inbound trailers in order to reduce the time freight spends in a crossdock. We use dynamic simulation models to compare the performance of several strategies. These are first-come, first-served, look-ahead, minimum processing time, and minimum total time policies. We examine these under different trailer arrival headways, crossdock layouts, and destination distributions. Our simulation results show that our time-based algorithms save more time than the first-come, first-served and look-ahead policies. In addition, these algorithms appear to result in higher service reliability and productivity.

The heterogeneous vehicle routing and truck scheduling problem in a multi-door cross-dock system

“…Other papers assume a multiple door cross-dock and a number of trucks greater than the number of doors. However, some of them only deal with the assignment and scheduling of inbound trucks (Wang and Regan, 2008;McWilliams et al, 2008;Rosales et al, 2009;Liao et al, 2013). They suppose that the outbound vehicles are already scheduled.…”