Development of a novel resource-constrained crossdocking model for the truck scheduling problem

Crossdocking is a warehousing strategy that moves products through flow consolidation centers or crossdocks without putting them into storage. To address various decision problems associated with crossdocking operations planning and scheduling, a careful modeling of the entire crossdocking operation is a prerequisite. This paper describes the development of a novel resource-constrained crossdocking model to address an important crossdocking planning problem which is the scheduling of trucks at crossdocking terminals. A mixed integer programming (MIP) model is proposed to formulate the truck scheduling problem. For the lack of real test data, the procedure of generating synthetic data is discussed and its compatibility to real-world applications is justified. The paper also discusses whether the crossdock capacity is a bottleneck resource in the operation of truck scheduling or not. The steps mentioned above build a realistic reliable framework to design and evaluate various sort of algorithms for this combinatorial optimization problem as our future work.