Enhancing Lateness Management in Cross-Docking

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Today's marketplace is moving faster than ever, and companies are challenged to distribute their products morequickly, efficiently and cost-effectively. This has led to the rise of cross docking in the global supply chain tohelp keep pace with customer demand. Cross-docking refers to the practice of unloading goods or materialsfrom an incoming vehicle (e.g., truck, train or vessel container) and then loading them directly onto outboundvehicles with no storage in between.A common form of cross-docking operations corresponds to single or multi-item pallets, which are unloaded,sorted based on their destination, and placed directly onto outbound vehicles. This strategy allowstransportation companies to move towards more proactive, agile and flexible supply chains, with shorterproduct cycles and easier product customization.While the assignment of inbound/outbound vehicles to cross-dock doors has been widely studied, very fewstudies exist on the lateness issues, i.e., (1) late return of containers to vessels when inbound vehicles arecontainers, and (2) late delivery to customers. We propose to investigate these lateness issues throughout theassignment of inbound containers to doors in order to minimize the tardiness penalties due to late containerreturns, and the mitigation of it with the tardiness penalties associated to late or early delivery of goods tocustomers. We will assume that the schedule of the outbound vehicles to be given in the research projectsassociated with the master students supported by the Engage grant, while the postdoctoral fellow (MITACSElevate to be submitted shortly) will assume flexible truck scheduling.We plan to design meta-heuristic algorithms, which will integrate some machine learning tools in order tobenefit from the lessons learned from the past in order to better estimate the travel times. Design and validation