A constraint programming model for the scheduling of JIT cross-docking systems with preemption

In this paper, a scheduling problem of minimizing the total of the earliness, tardiness and the number of preemption for the outbound trucks on a cross-dock system is considered. this problem, which is known to be np-hard, is compatible with the concepts of just-in-time (jit) production and supply chain management. a new multi-criteria model, with non-linear terms and integer variables, which cannot be solved efficiently for large sized problems, is proposed. this paper also shows how to map a jit cross-dock model to a constraint satisfaction problem (csp) and integer programming (ip). to solve the model for real size applications, a genetic algorithm (ga) is applied. finally, a computational experiment is carried out to analyze the performances of csp, ga and ip models with respect to modeling capability, solution quality and time.