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Cross Docking
Cross Docking
An interesting site:
http://web.nps.navy.mil/~krgue/Crossdocking/crossdocking.html
Examples
Home Depot operates a pre-distribution crossdock in Philadelphia serving more than 100 stores in the Northeast area. Wal-Mart uses
traditional warehousing for staple stock - i.e., items that customers are expected to find in the same place in every Wal-Mart (e.g., toothpaste, shampoo, etc.) crossdocking for direct ship - i.e., items that Wal-Mart buyers have gotten a great deal on and are pushing out to the stores
Costco uses pallet-based post-distribution crossdocking Computer firms like Dell consolidate the major computer components in merge in transit centers. JIT manufacturers consolidate inbound supplies in a nearby warehouse LTL and package carriers (UPS, FedEx) crossdock to consolidate freight
Crossdock Operations
Strip doors: doors where full trailers are parked and unloaded. Any incoming trailer can be unloaded to any strip door. Stack doors: doors where empty trailers are put to collect freight for specific destinations. Each stack door is permanently assigned to a distinct destination. Typical material handling modes: manual carts for smaller items pallet jacks and forklifts for pallet loads cart draglines (reduce walking time but impede forklift travel)
On the other hand, a building shape that minimizes its corners increases
the travel distances the traffic congestion in front of the most centrally located (and therefore, the best) doors
Some characterizations of the crossdock building shapes: diameter: max door-to-door distance
centrality: the ratio of the obtained number of extra doors over the resulting diameter increase for a symmetric expansion of the building by two doors at each end of it.
Crossdock layout
In general, centrally located doors should be reserved for the uloading activity and for destination with large outgoing flows. On the other hand, if the freight on each inbound trailer is destined to a small and stable set of customers, then the facility can be decongested by establishing distinct hubs serving clusters of destinations that tend to have their freight on the same incoming trailers. Two extensively used heuristics are:
the block heuristic: Assign first the unloading activity to the best doors (i.e. the doors having the smallest average distances to all other doors). Subsequently, assign the remaining doors to outbound destinations, prioritizing them in decreasing order of their flow intensities the alternating heuristic: The door assignment alternates between a strip door and a stack door to the destination with the next highest flow => The alternating heuristic produces solutions that are typically 10% better than the solutions produced by the block heuristic.
Trailer Scheduling
How should we pick the next inbound trailer to be processed at a free strip door? If the freight mix tends to be uniform across all inbound trailers, then a simple rule like FIFO will perform well. Otherwise, the selected trailer should be the one that will have the smallest processing time w.r.t. the considered strip door, among those currently waiting in the parking lot.