Sequencing the processing of incoming mail to match an outbound truck delivery schedule

This paper considers the problem of sequencing the processing of incoming mail in a processing and distribution center (P&DC) to match a given outbound truck delivery schedule. Mail arrives at a P&DC from local associate offices or remote P&DCs following an incoming schedule. The mail from an origin has different proportions to different destinations. For each destination, there are trucks scheduled with limited capacities. The objective of the problem is to determine the sequence in which the incoming mail should be processed so that the total unused truck capacity is minimized. Since we are not concerned with detailed scheduling/routing decisions inside the P&DC, we treat the P&DC system as a single machine. Dispatching rules and heuristics are proposed for this single machine problem and tested via computational experiments. Simulation experiments are performed to test the efficiency of these methods for the original multi-center multi-machine system.