Robust door assignment in less-than-truckload terminals

The assignment of incoming trailers to strip doors is one of the critical decisions that affect the performance of cross docking operations in less-than-truckload terminals. This paper introduces a mixed integer quadratic model with the objective of generating trailer-to-door assignments that equally distribute idle times at doors to accommodate operational level uncertainty encountered in truck arrival times. A door assignment heuristic is presented. The performance of the heuristic is compared with optimal solutions to small problems. The effectiveness of the proposed heuristic is studied under a variety of circumstances and terminal sizes. The simulation results show that the proposed heuristic is applicable to realistic-size terminals, and it is effective when variability in truck arrival and service times is considered.

► The trailer assignments are dynamic based on truck arrival and service times.
► The heuristic evenly distributes the idle times at doors to absorb operational level uncertainties.
► A customer oriented percent making cut-off metric is used to evaluate the heuristic.