Truck scheduling, which assigns a dock-door and a processing interval to each inbound and outbound truck, is an essential operational decision problem in cross-docking platforms and distribution centers. It has attracted considerable academic attention. Most studies, however, have neglected internal resources (e.g., workers or material handling equipment) and hence failed to address two major concerns of cross-docking practitioners: (i) determining the number of resources needed, and (ii) scheduling the internal resources in an efficient way. This study sets out to examine the value of utilizing the internal resource requirements as the main performance metrics in truck scheduling. The problem considered in this paper is how to schedule a set of inbound trucks with time windows at a multidoor cross-docking platform, where the departure times of outbound trucks follow a given schedule. The goal is to identify a feasible truck schedule that can be executed with a minimum number of internal resources. For this setting, a mixed-integer programming model is proposed. Furthermore, a column generation-based solution procedure is developed. We show that by using the internal resource requirements as the main performance measure, the operational efficiency of the cross-docking platform can be significantly increased. It also helps to avoid large peak workloads and leads to level truck schedules with superior resource utilization levels. Computational experiments show that the proposed heuristic algorithm can obtain high-quality solutions for very large problem instances within a short computation time. Due to its tight lower bound, the solution procedure can even prove optimality for most problem instances.

在跨接驳平台和配送中心，卡车调度为每个入站和出站卡车分配一个码头门和一个处理间隔，这是一个重要的运营决策问题。它引起了学术界的广泛关注。但是，大多数研究都忽略了内部资源（例如，工人或物料搬运设备），因此未能解决交叉配送从业者的两个主要问题：（i）确定所需的资源数量，以及（ii）安排内部资源以一种有效的方式。本研究着手探讨在卡车调度中利用内部资源需求作为主要绩效指标的价值。本文考虑的问题是如何在多门对接平台上安排一组带有时间窗的入站卡车，出港卡车的出发时间遵循给定的时间表。目标是确定可以用最少内部资源执行的可行卡车时间表。对于此设置，提出了混合整数编程模型。此外，开发了一种基于色谱柱生成的解决方法。我们表明，通过将内部资源需求用作主要性能指标，可以大大提高跨码头平台的运营效率。它还有助于避免大量的高峰工作量，并导致卡车调度表具有较高的资源利用率。计算实验表明，所提出的启发式算法可以在很短的计算时间内针对非常大的问题实例获得高质量的解决方案。由于其下限严格，