Two efficient constructive heuristics for scheduling trucks at crossdocking terminals

This paper studies an important crossdocking planning operation which is the scheduling of trucks at cross-docking terminals. The operation consists of two optimization problems: truck sequencing and door assignment. The problems are integrated and formulated as a machine scheduling problem. Two constructive heuristics are developed to address truck scheduling: a dependency ranking (DR) heuristic for truck sequencing and a machine fitness (MF) heuristic for door assignment. The solutions generated by the heuristics are compared with those of an MIP model formulated for the same problem. Considering the constructive nature of the proposed heuristics where no optimization technique has been employed, the quality of results compared to that of the CPLEX solver is quite promising. Also, the heuristics maintain scalability in solution time as the problem size increases to large scales.