Modeling and optimization for an air cargo terminal

Abstract

This research work studies the modeling and optimization for an air cargo inbound terminal. Operations in the terminal include cargo receiving, checking-packing, order-picking, and shipping. There are many factors that affect the operation performances in the terminal. The factors investigated in this thesis are the cargo flow time, workload balancing, and congestion effects. A multi-objective mixed-integer programming model is formulated to improve the assignment plan. It aims to provide a series of non-dominated solutions. These solutions are then input to a simulation framework which will identify the best solution(s) to the preference of the decision maker. The performances of these solutions in simulation are collected and compared for decision making.Such a research approach including MIP formulation and simulation modeling is applied to an inbound air cargo terminal. Extensive computational experiments are conducted with actual data as the input sources.