Simulation-based personnel planning for materials handling at a cross-docking center under retail distribution environment

This study focuses on the personnel planning of materials handling at a real cross-docking center under a retail distribution environment. Materials handling at a cross-docking center is complicated and labour intensive. Managers are usually under enormous pressure to optimize personnel planning to deal with an increasing variety of items handled by different processes. In this study, a flexible and stepwise procedure of personnel planning is proposed to minimize the total personnel expenses at a cross-docking center, especially taking merchandise mixing and operator skills into consideration. The procedure includes adopting simulation together with integer programming. In addition, the procedure is applied to an actual cross-docking center in order to confirm its effectiveness. Furthermore, the proposed method is found to be both practical and powerful to assist logistics managers in their personnel planning efforts.