Automated Optimization and Simulation of a Cross-Docking Terminal

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Transport Bourassa is a Canadian Based company that provides high quality and comprehensive transport andstorage services for a wide range of customers located in Canada and United States. Transport Bourassa isexpanding their services and increase its capacity to offer services for more customers. This expansion shouldbe controlled and avoid wrong decisions. Thus, Transport Bourassa needs new strategies and tools to optimizedock door assignment and scheduling to decide on the sequence of inbound and outbound trucks at given set ofdock doors of the terminal. The research project will lead to the development and adoption of optimizationtechniques to increase the productivity of the cross dock, reduce cost and avoid delay. This innovative solutionwill be called Automated Optimization and Simulation of a Cross Docking Terminal, and will allow thecompany to better serves its customers. In order to achieve this objective, three main research themes will bedeveloped in this project.The first theme will target the development of model for the docking sequences of the inbound and outboundtrucks to the receiving and shipping docks in order to minimize total operation time or in order to maximize thethroughput of the cross docking system. The product assignments from the inbound trucks to the outboundtrucks are also decided upon simultaneously, along with the docking sequences of the inbound and outboundtrucks. As first step for model validation, we will test the model with a small size problem to validate theavailability of information that we need for the case study.In the scond theme, will propose new heuristic algorithm in order to improve the efficiency in solving mediumto large problems. The algorithm will be tested with real data available at Transport Bourassa.The third theme will focus on the development of an optimization platform based on Excel spreadsheetprogramming and will perform all the basic features of connecting to the existent system of the company to