A truck scheduling problem at a cross-docking facility with mixed service mode dock doors

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this study is truck scheduling and assignment of trucks to the doors simultaneously since these issues were considered mainly separately in the previous research. Also, the door service time and its impact on truck scheduling were not taken into account, so this research endeavors to cover this gap. Design/methodology/approach In this research, a novel model has been presented for simultaneous truck scheduling and assignment problem with time window constraints for the arrival and departure of trucks, mixed service mode dock doors and truck queuing. To resolve the developed model, two meta-heuristic algorithms, namely, genetic and imperialist competitive algorithms, are presented. Findings The computational results indicate that the proposed framework leads to increased total costs, although it has a more accurate planning; moreover, these indicate that the proposed algorithms have different performances based on the criteria considered for the comparison. Research limitations/implications There are some limitations in this research, which can be considered by other researchers to expand the current study, among them the specifications of uncertainty about arrival times of inbound and outbound trucks, number of merchandises which has been loaded on inbound trucks are the main factors. If so, by considering this situation, a realistic scheme about planning of cross docking system would be acquired. Moreover, the capacity of temporary storage has been considered unlimited, so relaxing this limitation can prepare a real and suitable situation for further study. Examining the capacity in the front of each type of doors of cross-dock and executive servers are the other aspects, which could be expanded in the future. Originality/value In this study, a mathematical programing model proposed for truck scheduling to minimize total costs including holding, truck tardiness and waiting time for queue of trucks caused by the interference of each carrier’s movement. At the operational levels, this research considered a multi-door cross-docking problem with mixed service mode dock doors and time window constraints for arrival and departure time of trucks. Moreover, M/G/C queue system was developed for truck arrival and servicing of carriers to trucks.

A WOA-Based Optimization Approach for Task Scheduling in Cloud Computing Systems

“…The second step is to divide the population into n inc groups using a general clustering approach as presented in Algorithm 1, and the optimal individual in each group is selected to form a set S. based on randomly selecting two individuals x 1 and x 2 from S, new individuals are generated in a cross way [51], as shown in Eq. (19), where α ∈ (0, 1).…”

“…The reason is that they are shown to be highly effective and can find approximately optimal solutions in polynomial time rather than exponential time, compared to conventional methods [3], [13]. In fact, various metaheuristics as well as their variations have been used to solve scheduling problems in many fields [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], which also include the cloud computing. As summarized by the latest survey [21], currently metahuristics used in cloud task scheduling mainly include the genetic algorithm (GA) [22] and swarm intelligence algorithms, such as the ant colony optimization (ACO) [23] and the particle swarm optimization (PSO) [24].…”

Truck Scheduling at Cross-Docking Terminals: A Follow-Up State-Of-The-Art Review

“…Vahdani and Shahramfard [43] investigated the truck scheduling problem at a multiple door CDT, which operates doors in a mixed service mode. The objective function was to minimize the total cost, which included the total holding cost, the total late departure cost, and the total waiting cost.…”

Adaptive memory red deer algorithm for cross-dock truck scheduling with products time window

“…In previous works, which considered the time windows in TSPCD, the authors mostly only consider the constraints on arrival and departure time of trucks or the loading and unloading times (Schwerdfeger et al , 2018; Heidari et al , 2018; Molavi et al , 2018; Tadumadze et al , 2019; Vahdani and Shahramfard, 2019; Ozden and Saricicek, 2019; Arabani et al , 2010) of products. However, in this study, the concept of product time windows in a cross-dock is first proposed, which means some types of products should be prior to others according to their requirements in the scheduling.…”