Scheduling compound trucks in multi-door cross-docking terminals.

One of the most important operational management problems in a cross-docking terminal is truck scheduling problem. In this paper, we consider a truck scheduling problem for three types of trucks (inbound-only trucks, outbound-only trucks, and compound trucks) in a multi-door cross-docking terminal. The objective of the problem is to determine the door assignments and the docking sequences of all three types of trucks simultaneously to minimize the makespan. A mathematical model for optimal solution is derived and two meta-heuristics, genetic algorithm and self-evolution algorithm, are proposed. The performance of the meta-heuristic algorithms are evaluated using randomly generated several examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]