Cross-Dock Trailer Scheduling

Cross-dock scheduling research

At Ohio State, I worked on trailer scheduling for a cross-docking operation. The system needed to assign incoming trailers to strip doors for a specific time window while keeping the search practical as the dock grew.

What I built

• Built a Python application that pulled trailer data and assigned trailers to strip doors for the matching time frame.
• Formulated the assignment as a linear programming optimization problem.
• Implemented a nearest-neighbor strategy to reduce the search space and get a practical solution faster than exhaustive search.
• Built a discrete event simulation to study the effect on workforce and throughput.
• Explored a four-door flow-shop scheduling formulation with precedence constraints and compared it with branch and bound.

Why it mattered

This was the first place where my operations research work started looking like production systems work: live data, a real scheduling problem, simulation for decision support, and a model that had to be useful outside a notebook.