Truck scheduling in a cross-docking terminal by using novel robust heuristics

Nowadays, one of the major goals of the distribution environment is to reduce lead times and inventories. Cross-docking is a logistics technique which removes the storage and picking up the functions of a warehouse. The term cross-docking refers to moving products directly from incoming to outgoing trailers with little or no storage in between. According to the recent related papers, the truck scheduling problem is one of the objectives for cross-docking systems which is divided into smaller parts. The first stage is about the assignment of the trucks to the dock doors while the second stage aims to sequence all inbound and outbound trucks, in an effective way. Therefore, for dealing with the truck scheduling problem in a cross-docking system, this paper develops five heuristics. The obtained results are compared with those from the previous works. We use many test problems in the literature that were created in different sizes to study the performance of the novel heuristics. In small and medium dimensions the minimum value which found is related to one of the methods CDH3 (Cross Dock Heuristic) which has been proposed in this paper beside in all scales the method CDH4 is the best among others. The numerical results show that the developed heuristics are able to find quick good solutions with fast convergence.