Scheduling truck arrivals and departures in a crossdock: Earliness, tardiness and storage policies

This article proposes a model to simultaneously plan truck arrivals, truck departures and internal pallet handling in a crossdocking platform. The objective is to minimize both the total number of pallets put in storage on the planning horizon, and the dissatisfaction of the transportation providers, by creating a truck schedule as close as possible to the wished schedule they communicate in advance. The problem is modeled with an integer program, which is tested on generated instances to assess its performances, especially regarding the computation time. Since the execution takes too long to be used by platform managers on a daily basis, two heuristics are also proposed and tested. We show in which conditions each heuristic performs best, which can help in choosing a solution method when confronted to a real-life problem.