A Web-Based Tool for Cross Dock Trailer Scheduling
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2024-09-30
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Edition:Final Report (September 2024)
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Abstract:Cross docks are transshipment facilities designed to consolidate freight between shippers and customers. Freight arrives at cross-docks from geographically dispersed suppliers and is consolidated to destinations (e.g., customers) thereby increasing trailer utilization by avoiding having each supplier send orders to each customer individually, often are partially filled trailers. A well-run cross-dock has high throughput, so scheduling arrival and departure times of trucks is critical to effective and efficient operations. A previous C2M2 project focused on this problem using a mixed integer programming model that is well-known to be non-deterministic polynomial-time hard. A new solution approach based on simulation annealing was proposed that found near-optimal solutions. This project animates the results of this research so that anyone may view it even if they do not have the skills to understand the underlying research. This was accomplished with a web-based animation tool that is available on the C2M2 website. There are a number of user-specified inputs that define the scenario which is animated. Times were scaled so that the animation runs in a few minutes rather than the multiple hours that would occur at a real cross dock; however, since parameters of the model and animation are consistent with practice, the sequence reflects the solution determined by the near-optimal solution of the mixed integer programming model and all timing of trucks (arrival and departures) are also the same as the near-optimal solution in a relative sense (i.e., they are just scaled to be shorter).
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