Scheduling inbound and outbound trucks at cross docking terminals

At cross docking terminals, shipments from inbound trucks are unloaded, sorted and moved to dispatch points where they are directly loaded onto outbound trucks for an immediate delivery elsewhere in the distribution system. This warehouse management concept aims at realizing economies in transportation cost by consolidating divergent shipments to full truckloads without requiring excessive inventory at the cross dock. The efficient operation of such a system requires an appropriate coordination of inbound and outbound trucks, e.g. by computerized scheduling procedures. This work introduces a base model for scheduling trucks at cross docking terminals, which relies on a set of simplifying assumptions in order to derive fundamental insights into the underlying problem's structure, i.e. its complexity, and to develop a building block solution procedure, which might be employed to solve more complex real-world truck scheduling problems.