The management of air cargo containers, or unit load devices (ULD), requires a large amount of manual labour. ULDs usually have to be broken down and the shipments therein have to be distributed among new ULDs bound to the shipments respective destinations. For build-up and break-down, a ULD has to be assigned a work station and a time window that is constrained by arrival and departure times and the available workforce. Mistakes in the planning step can severely disrupt the cargo flow since any wasted workforce capacity will miss later in the process. Planning is further complicated by usually incomplete information about measurements and weights of shipments and possible delays of incoming ULDs. The problem is currently solved with heuristics in industry applications. In this project, we will study which aspects of integer programming, robust optimization, stochastic methods and machine learning are best suited for the planning of air cargo ground handling. We suspect that the best performance will shift from machine learning/stochastical approaches to combinatorial optimization if we move from long-term to short-term planning.
Further, we will study in which way methods from both domains can be combined (e.g. prognosis, parameterization of the optimization model). For a realistic evaluation, we will also create a customizable simulation environment.

 

Publications

2024
Labeling methods for partially ordered paths European Journal of Operational Research, 318(1), pp. 19-30, 2024 Ricardo Euler, Pedro Maristany de las Casas BibTeX
DOI
arXiv
Air Cargo Ground Handling
ULD Build-Up Scheduling with Logic-Based Benders Decomposition Integration of Constraint Programming, Artificial Intelligence, and Operations Research, pp. 259-276, Vol.14742, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2024 Ricardo Euler, Ralf Borndörfer, Christian Puchert, Tuomo Takkula BibTeX
DOI
Air Cargo Ground Handling
2022
ULD Build-Up Scheduling with Dynamic Batching in an Air Freight Hub Operations Research Proceedings 2021, pp. 254-260, Lecture Notes in Operations Research, 2022 (preprint available as ZIB-Report 21-31) Ricardo Euler, Ralf Borndörfer, Timo Strunk, Tuomo Takkula PDF (ZIB-Report)
BibTeX
DOI
Air Cargo Ground Handling