Modeling and Designing a Cross Dock Warehouse Considering Space and Retailer’s Satisfaction

Designing a warehouse entry system, layout, movement and removal of products from the warehouse is critical to maximizing productivity. The use of cross docking has become increasingly important to speed up warehouse operations. Cross docking is a distribution strategy that plays an important role in enhancing the efficiency of distribution networks and reducing customer response times. In loading and unloading products through cross dock warehouses, the products are unloaded by incoming trucks and with a slight delay and sometimes without any delays, they are loaded directly into the outgoing trucks in the temporary storage area. This article, deals with the modeling and design of a cross dock warehouse and the purpose is to determine the allocation of warehouse floor locations to retailers in order to minimize the distance traveled in the warehouse and the vacant space of the warehouse and also maximizing the satisfaction of retailers by considering their shipping priorities. Augmented Epsilon constraint method is used to solve the problem. Finally, ideas and suggestions are presented to develop the model.