Heuristics for cross-docking scheduling of truck arrivals, truck departures and shop-floor operations

This work studies the problem of cross-docking truck scheduling introduced by (Int J Prod Econ 194:102–112, Serrano et al. 2017), where internal operations including repacking and storing operations are considered. The objective is to minimize the number of inbound trucks which are assigned beyond their contracted time windows. For the special case where only inbound truck arrivals are considered while the outbound truck departures are not ensured, we present some properties of the model and propose a heuristic algorithm called Light Period and Less Options (LPLO) to solve it. For the general case of the problem, due to its NP-hardness, we design a non-trivial Three-phase Greedy (TG) algorithm and the Genetic algorithm (GA). Experimental results with comparison between exact solutions by the CPLEX solver and solutions by the two heuristic algorithms demonstrate that the both proposed heuristic algorithms are of high efficiency in generating optimal or nearly optimal solutions for the considered problem in this work.