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

Ruslan Sadykov (1, 2)

1 Realopt - Reformulations based algorithms for Combinatorial Optimization
2 IMB - Institut de Mathématiques de Bordeaux

At cross docking terminals, products from incoming trucks are sorted according to their destinations and transferred to outgoing trucks using a small temporary storage. Such terminals allow companies to reduce storage and transportation costs in a supply chain. This paper focuses on the operational activities at cross docking terminals. We consider the trucks scheduling problem with the objective to minimise the storage usage during the product transfer. We show that a simplification of this NP-hard problem in which the departure sequences of incoming and outgoing trucks are fixed is polynomially solvable and propose a dynamic programming algorithm for it. The results of numerical tests of the algorithm on randomly generated instances are also presented.

Domaines: Recherche opérationnelle [math.OC]

Ruslan Sadykov. Scheduling incoming and outgoing trucks at cross docking terminals to minimize the storage cost. Annals of Operations Research, 2012, 201 (1), pp.423-440. ⟨10.1007/s10479-012-1232-0⟩. ⟨inria-00539849⟩