Improving air cargo service through efficient order release

Besides providing accurate and timely shipments, a major deciding factor of the quality of air cargo handling services is the close-up time; i.e. the time between receiving a cargo and the scheduled take-off time of the intended flight. A shorter close-up time will allow for more time at upstream processes. To shorten the close-up time, cargos are processed quickly and stored at a staging area to be ready for loading to airplane, so that resources at the initial phase of cargo handling process (space and operators) are freed up to accept more cargos. This has led to a serious congestion problem at the staging area. It is thus important to model the entire air cargo handling process so that the overall efficiency could be enhanced and some pertinent yardsticks are optimized. In this paper, based on empirical field study, an algorithm is developed to balance the workload so as to reduce congestion at the major cargo terminal. In particular, a multicommodity network flow model is formulated so as to capture the dynamic demands of both transshipments and export cargos. To facilitate practical implementation, a heuristic is then developed and tested through simulation.