Integrating truck scheduling and employee rostering in a cross-docking platform - an iterative approach

In a cross-docking platform, goods are unloaded, transferred and reloaded into trucks with little or no storage in between. The crossdock truck scheduling problem addresses the hard problem of coordinating the truck operations. However, crossdock operations are mostly done manually: it is therefore important to take staffing issues into account while building the truck schedule. This article shows how a truck scheduling model and an employee timetabling and rostering model can be combined to address both problems in an integrated manner. Three approaches are compared. The sequential approach consists in sequentially solving the two problems: from the truck schedule calculated first, a workload is deduced and used as input for the employee timetabling and rostering process. The iterative approach consists in solving both problems one after another in an iterative manner until a stable point is reached. Two iterative procedures are proposed, employees-first and trucks-first.