Vehicle Scheduling Problem at a Cross-Docking Terminal

Traditional warehousing had been seen as a “high-cost function associated with dark and dusty sheds”. But with cross-docking operation, warehousing is now recognized as a vital value-adding link between firms and the supply chain. By arranging for immediate cross docking of incoming product, retailers are able to reduce to a minimum in-transit time for their incoming products. However, cross docking requires close synchronization of all inbound and outbound shipments. In this paper three different control policies at a cross-docking terminal are compared: uncoordinated, common headway, and integer ratio headways. A heuristic algorithm is developed to optimize both inbound and outbound headways as integer multiples of a base cycle, which is a round fraction of 24 hours, for all coordinated inbound and outbound vehicles. Our results show that integer ratio headways strategy is the best among these three strategies.