Truck dock assignment problem with time window in warehouses

In this study,the problem of assigning trucks to the truck loading points under time constraint has been addressed in the context of a food company which is operating in Turkey. The problem is basically a combinatorial optimization problem which includes decisions to assign which vehicle to which door and in what order when the number of trucks exceed the number of doors at a warehouse. The priority for assigning trucks to the doors varies according to priority of customers which can be expressed with the delivery time and urgent customers. The aim is to minimize the total logistics cost using best possible gate assignment to respond to customer demands. In case of late delivery, a penalty cost is added to the objective function. Mixed-integer linear programming model was developed for solving this problem. In this thesis, since real data could not be reached to provide a solution for this model due to the time constraint, a heuristic approach, a genetic algorithm is coded in Matlab environment to test real data. The results show that this developed approach is successful.Keywords: Truck Assignment, Scheduling, Warehouse Dock, Genetic Algorithms, Combinatorial Optimization