A Two-Phase Greedy Heuristic for Cross-dock Scheduling of Truck Arrivals, Truck Departures and Shop-floor Operations

The problem of truck scheduling and the planning of internal operations with repacking operation is considered in this paper. This paper modifies the exiting model on this problem first. We have tested the model on a set of small-scale instances by solver CPLEX. The results are presented in this paper. However, many real instances of this problem are large-scale and hard to solve. Therefore, it is necessary to propose some solutions for the problem of scheduling related to large-scale cross-dock centers. Focusing on the cross-dock truck scheduling, we propose a novel two-phase greedy heuristic solution method to plan the assignment of trucks' arrival time, repacking operations and trucks' departure time. The objective is to minimize the penalty cost caused by breach of contract with suppliers. The problem is solved iteratively by considering some priority rules. The greedy algorithm solves large scale instances of the problem efficiently.