Cost‐stable truck scheduling at a cross‐dock facility with unknown truck arrivals: A meta‐heuristic approach

We study a cross‐dock operator’s truck scheduling problem at inbound doors in case of unknown truck arrival times. Due to uncertainty of truck arrivals, a scheduling strategy is subject to variations in costs of serving the trucks. A cost‐stable scheduling strategy is defined as a schedule with low variation levels. In this paper, we analyze the cross‐dock operator’s problem of determining a cost‐stable scheduling strategy while minimizing the average of total service costs. A bi‐objective bi‐level optimization problem is formulated and we discuss a genetic algorithm based heuristic to find Pareto efficient schedules. The proposed approach is compared to first‐come‐first‐served policies.