Truck dock assignment problem with operational time constraint within crossdocks

In this paper, we consider a truck dock assignment problem with operational time constraint in crossdocks where the number of trucks exceeds the number of docks available. The objective is to find an optimal assignment of trucks that minimizes the operational cost of the cargo shipments and the total number of unfulfilled shipments. We combine the above two objectives into one term: the total cost, a sum of the total dock operational cost and the penalty cost for all the unfulfilled shipments. The problem is then formulated as an Integer Programming (IP) model. A genetic algorithm (GA), in which the operators relate to the IP model constraints, is then proposed. Computational experiments are conducted, showing that the proposed GA dominates the CPLEX Solver in nearly all test cases adapted from industrial applications.