The Vehicles’ Cross-docking Consolidation Shipment Problem With Random Demand

Today’s customer-driven economy has transformed the logistics industry. To competeeffectively, suppliers are recognizing they must do business their customer’s way-findingmethods to move products more quickly, efficiently and cost effectively. To achieve thesegoals, more and more companies are finding that cross docking must play an integral partin their distribution model. On the other hand, vehicle logistics has been paid more andmore attentions recently. Although cross-docking appears in vehicle logistics overseas,there is little research on this topic in domestic academic. This thesis catches the gapbetween cross-docking and vehicle logistics to illustrate the basic model for vehiclelogistics shipment problem under cross-docking with random demand, and analyses theextended application cases.The thesis pays attention to the policies in vehicle logistics shipment problem underCross docking. First we assume that the random demand obeys the rules of PoissonProcess, then refer to Cetinkaya(2010)’s model to develop the basic model for the Crossdocking consolidation shipment problem with random demand. We consider the case withTQ-based policy in a cross docking which usually bears only a few inventories and obtainsome basic conclusions. In order to increase the application value of this model, wediscuss the cases in which some parameters changes, including the random demand rate,the fixed set up, multi-destinations distribution, and the customer disutility. The sense ofthe thesis relies on two aspects: firstly, provides the effective consolidation policies tosolve the problems in vehicle logistics; secondly, offers the theoretical evidence to thecross-docking application in vehicle logistics consolidation shipment.