Scheduling the Internal Operations in Distribution Centers with Buffer Constraints

This paper introduces a new problem on the schedule of the internal operations in Distribution Centers with buffer constraints. This distribution center is devoted to the distribution of goods from suppliers to customers. We divide the internal operations in three phases: de-consolidation, sorting and consolidation. We propose an Integer Linear Programming formulation to model the problem. The objective is to minimize the total operation time determining the optimal sequence of the operations in the three phases. We also present some examples to highlight the impact of the buffer capacity constraints on the system.