Heuristics for Truck Scheduling at Cross Docking Terminals

complies with the regulations of the University and meets the accepted standards with respect to originality and quality. Cross-docking is a logistics management concept that has been gaining global recognition in less-than-truckload logistics industries and retail firms. In cross-docking terminals, shipments are unloaded from inbound trucks at strip doors, consolidated insider cross-docks according to their destinations, and then, loaded into outbound tucks at stack doors. The goal of cross-docking is to reduce inventory and order picking which are the two most costly functions of traditional warehousing management. The sequence in which the inbound and outbound trucks have to be processed at the cross-dock is crucial for improving the efficiency of cross-docking systems. In this thesis we introduce an integer programming formulation and apply four heuristic algorithms: a local search, a simulated annealing, a large neighborhood search and a beam search, to schedule the trucks in a cross-docking terminal so as to minimize the total operational time. iv Acknowledgements