A mathematical model for truck-door assignment and product placement problem in cross-docking center

In today's cross-docking offers a significant cost benefits to companies because of the small orders and frequent deliveries in logistical environment. Cross-docking is a relatively new logistics strategy in which items are moved from suppliers to customers through cross-docking centers without putting them into long-term storage. One of the fundamental issues in cross-docking facility is to assign the incoming and outgoing trucks to the doors in order to minimize movement of the products. This paper addresses the truck-door assignment problem of cross-docking centers with product placement plans and proposes a mixed integer mathematical model to solve problem. The objective of the mathematical model is to find best truck-door assignment and product placement plans that minimize total travelling distance of the products. The proposed model is tested on a problem set which are created by using a real-life data of a logistics company. The computational results show that the proposed mathematical model can be carried out for the real-life operations to minimize movement costs of the products in cross-docking centers. Keywords: Cross-docking, truck-door assignment, product placement, mathematical modelling