A Genetic Algorithm for Scheduling of Trucks with Inbound and Outbound Process in Multi-Door Cross Docking Terminals

Cross docking is a logistics management concept in which items delivered to a terminal by inbound trucks are immediately sorted out, routed and loaded into outbound trucks for delivery to customers. Two main advantages by introducing a cross docking terminal are to consolidate multiple smaller shipment into full truck load and remove storage and order picking processes to save up logistics costs related to warehousing and transportation costs. This research considers the scheduling problem of trucks in the cross docking terminals with multi-door in an inbound and outbound dock, respectively. The trucks sequentially deal with the storage process at the one of inbound doors and the shipping process at the one of the outbound doors. A mathematical model for an optimal solution is derived, and genetic algorithms with two different chromosome representations are proposed. To verify performance of the GA algorithms, we compare the solutions of GAs with the optimal solutions and the best solution using randomly generated several examples.