Truck to door assignment in a shared cross-dock under uncertainty

Abstract This paper addresses the optimization of the truck to door assignment problem in cross-docks. It defines a new form of horizontal collaboration between suppliers by sharing the platform’s resources in order to enhance service level and reduce economical costs. Moreover, this study proposes to solve the problem considering uncertainty in transfer time that is frequently observed in real-world cross-docks. Due to imprecise arrival time of trucks, equipment breakdown, or workload variation, etc, the actual transfer time tends to be shorter or longer than the prefixed one. This uncertainty is modeled as a triangular fuzzy number then a Fuzzy Chance Programming model has been proposed to solve the problem using possibilistic measures. The efficiency and robustness of both (deterministic and fuzzy) proposed models are tested empirically and obtained results confirm the positive effect of collaboration and uncertainty handling.