Scheduling Inbound and OutboundTrucks 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 out-bound trucks for an immediate delivery elsewhere in the distribution system.This warehouse management concept aims at realizing economies in trans-portation cost by consolidating divergent shipments to full truckloads with-out requiring excessive inventory at the cross dock. The ecient operation ofsuch a system requires an appropriate coordination of inbound and outboundtrucks, e.g. by computerized scheduling procedures. This work introducesa base model for scheduling trucks at cross docking terminals, which relieson a set of simplifying assumptions in order to derive fundamental insightsinto the underlying problem's structure, i.e. its complexity, and to developa building block solution procedure, which might be employed to solve morecomplex real-world truck scheduling problems....