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.