An Application Oriented Multi-Agent Based Approach to Dynamic Truck Scheduling at Cross-Dock

Truck arrival management forms a very active stream of research and a crucial challenge for a cross-dock terminals. The study focuses on the truck congestion problem, which leads to a lower operation efficiency and a longer waiting time at the gate and at the yard. One of the operational measures to solve this problem is the truck appointment system. It is used to coordinate the major cross-dock planning activities and to regulate the arrival time of trucks at the cross-dock. When the trucker get an appointment time different to its preference time, then we are talking about a truck deviation time. Because the deviation will result in daily operations schedule, an optimization model for truck appointment was proposed in this paper. In the model, the truck deviation time was minimized subject to the constraints of resources availability including dock doors, yard zones, gate lanes, workforce and material handling systems. To solve the model, a method based multi-agent system to real-time truck scheduling, that take into account the uncertainty of arrival time as an operational characteristic, was designed. It ensures a negotiation among truck agents and resource agents. Lastly, a numerical experiments are provided to illustrate the validity of the model and to illustrate the working and benefit of our approach.