• Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.167-184
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• 2013

A cross docking operation involves multiple inbound trucks that deliver items from suppliers to a distribution center and multiple outbound trucks that ship items from the distribution center to customers. Based on customer demands, an inbound truck may have its items transferred to multiple outbound trucks. Similarly, an outbound truck can receive its consignments from multiple inbound trucks. The objective of this study is to find the best truck spotting sequence for both inbound and outbound trucks in order to minimize total operation time of the cross docking system under the condition that multiple visits to the dock by a truck to unload or load its consignments is allowed. The allocations of the items from inbound trucks to outbound trucks are determined simultaneously with the spotting sequences of both the inbound and outbound trucks.

• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
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• v.37 no.4
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• pp.342-349
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• 2011

This paper considers the inbound and outbound truck scheduling problem in a cross docking terminal. The unloading process from inbound trucks and loading process to outbound trucks are assumed to be performed within a time window. If some items are not able to be loaded to their scheduled outbound trucks within the time window, they are stored in the terminal and shipped using the truck visiting the next time window. The objective of this paper is to schedule inbound and outbound trucks to minimize the number of items unable to ship within the time window. A mathematical model for an optimal solution is derived, and a rule-based local search heuristic algorithm and genetic algorithm (GA) are proposed. The performance of the algorithms are evaluated using randomly generated several examples.

• Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.103-114
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• 2006

A cross docking operation involves multiple trucks (known as inbound trucks) that deliver items from suppliers to a distribution center and multiple trucks (known as outbound trucks) that ship items from the distribution center to customers. Based on customer demands, an inbound truck may have its items transferred to multiple outbound trucks. Similarly, an outbound truck can receive its consignments from multiple inbound trucks. A unique characteristic of a cross docking system is the absence or prohibition of long term storage of items at the distribution center. Items delivered to the distribution center from suppliers are shipped to customers as soon as possible without being placed in storage in the distribution center. The objective of this paper is to develop the optimal operational strategy for finding the best truck docking sequence for both inbound and outbound trucks in order to minimize total operation time where a temporary storage area is not available in a cross docking system.

• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
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• v.37 no.3
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• pp.248-257
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• 2011

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.

• Industrial Engineering and Management Systems
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.299-311
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• 2015

Nowadays, the distribution centres aim to reduce costs by reducing inventory and timely shipment. Cross docking is a logistics strategy in which products delivered to a distribution centre by inbound trucks are directly unloaded and transferred to outbound trucks with minimum warehouse storage. Moreover, on-time delivery in a distribution network becomes very crucial especially when several distribution centres and customers are involved. Therefore, an efficient truck scheduling is needed to synchronize the delivery throughout the network in order to satisfy all stake-holders. This paper presents a mathematical model of a mixed integer programming for door assignment and truck scheduling in a multiple inbound and outbound doors cross docking problem according to Just-In-Time concept. The objective is to find the schedule of transhipment operations to simultaneously minimize the total earliness and total tardiness of trucks. Then, a multi-objective differential evolution (MODE) is proposed with an encoding scheme and four decoding strategies, called ITSH, ITDD, OTSH and OTDD, to find a Pareto frontier for the multi-door cross docking problems. The performances of MODE are evaluated using 15 generated instances. The numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is capable of finding a set of diverse and high quality non-dominated solutions.