The Truck Scheduling Problem at Crossdocking Terminals - Exclusive versus Mixed Mode

In this paper we study the scheduling of the docking operations of trucks at a warehouse; each truck is either empty and needs to be loaded, or full and has to be unloaded (but not both). We focus on crossdocking, which is a recent warehouse concept that favors the transfers of as many incoming products as possible directly to outgoing trailers, without intermediate storage in the warehouse. We propose a time-indexed integer programming formulation for scheduling the loading and unloading of the trucks at the docks, and we distinguish between a so-called " mixed mode " , in which some or all of the docks can be used both for loading as well as unloading, and an " exclusive mode " , in which each dock is dedicated to only one of the two types of operations. Computational experiments are provided to compare the efficiency of the two modes.

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