An Integrated Model For Crossdock Operations Including Staging

Crossdock operations are designed to consolidate and quickly move goods from a variety of origins to a variety of destinations. The key performance characteristics used to measure crossdock performance are outgoing truck cube utilisation and load dwell time in the crossdock. These two measures are at odds with each other, and satisfying one comes at the expense of satisfying the other. The paper develops an integrated crossdock operations model that optimises this trade-off and accounts for incoming and outgoing truck door assignment, staging allocation/location, and load scheduling. The problem is further explored experimentally to determine factor contributions to maximising overall operations revenue. Finally, a genetic algorithm is developed to solve large-scale problems.