Truck scheduling at a cross-dock with repackaging
Abstract
Crossdocking is distribution strategy which main benefits are economies in transportation, decrease of lead time and reduction of inventories. Incoming products are unloaded, sorted, consolidated and transferred from inbound trucks to outbound trucks, with minimum of storage or treatment in-between. The international development of the automotive industry has been supported in part by crossdocking platforms linking distant production sites with nearby suppliers. For some packages, a repackaging is performed. In this framework, we propose a mixed integer linear programming model to schedule inbound trucks arrival times, shop-floor operation and outbound trucks departure times. Constraints on storage capacity, resources capacities and time windows on truck arrival are considered. Model’s objective is to minimize penalties linked to truck arrival times. The model is implemented in CPLEX and numerical experiments on small-sizes instances confirm the pertinence of the model.