Crossdocks play important roles in supply chain operations. Due to the need to decrease transportation leadtime to coordinate with other supply chain activities such as just-in-time, make-to-order or merge-in-transit strategies, minimizing labor costs is not necessarily the only goal in crossdock operations. In this research, we schedule waiting inbound trucks in such as way as to allow for the early departure of outgoing trucks. This minimizes the time freight spends in a crossdock. We use a dynamic simulation model to compare the performance of First-come-first-served, Look-ahead and Leave-early policies under different truck inter-arrival times and crossdock layouts. From our simulation results, we find that our Leave-early algorithm can save up to 12% on freight wait time in outgoing trucks and 4% on total time relative to the other policies under a 4 receiving doors and 4 shipping doors layout. In addition we suggest guidelines for choosing scheduling algorithms in different situations.
Abstract