Inbound Truck Scheduling with Estimated Times of Arrival

Yard management consists of optimization problems related to the synchronization of truck arrivals, departures, and resource utilization within logistic distribution centers. In this context, the inherent uncertainty of truck arrival times and their impact on assignment decisions can be mitigated by the use of technologies that provide estimated time of arrivals (ETA) in quasi-real-time. To this end, we consider the dynamic problem of assigning inbound trucks to loading docks at a distribution center with the objective of minimizing the total waiting, where ETAs are used to adjust belief distributions on truck arrival times. We propose a partially observable markov decision process formulation for the problem, and devise lookahead algorithms for it. Furthermore, we develop a bound based on information relaxation. Lastly, we demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithms through a series of computational experiments.

About Ola Jabali

Prof. Ola Jabali is an associate professor of operations research and discrete optimization at the Politecnico di Milano. She is also an affiliated professor at HEC Montréal, Canada, and a collaborating member of the Interuniversity Research Centre on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation (CIRRELT). Ola’s research interests deal with modelling realistic problems arising in transportation, production and logistics. She mainly focuses on optimizing goods transportation, in particular problems related to pollution, uncertainty, fleet composition and customer service.