Scheduling of Third-Party Trucks in Finished Products Transportation for Manufacturing Enterprises

Manufacturing enterprises’ production amount of finished products varies every day, requiring repeated coordination between transportation demand and truck supply. In the case of third-party logistics companies undertaking the transportation of finished products, as several companies are involved, manufacturing enterprises have difficulties in releasing dynamic information on transportation needs in real time, resulting in truck queueing or truck vacancy. This paper draws on the idea of the truck appointment system (TAS) to design the new appointment rule. We set the optimal appointment quota to ensure that the queue is short and there are trucks waiting to transport the next batch of finished products. In the numerical experiment, we solve for the optimal appointment quota.