Air cargo load and route planning in pickup and delivery operations

Abstract: In the aerial pickup and delivery of goods in a distribution network, transport aviation faces risks of load imbalance due to the urgency required for loading, immediate take-off, and mission accomplishment. Transport planners deal with trip itineraries, prioritisation of items, building up pallets, and balanced loading, but there are no commercially available systems that can integrally assist in all these requirements. This enables other risks, such as improper delivery, excessive fuel burn, and possible safety issues due to cargo imbalance, as well as a longer than necessary turn-around time. This NP-hard problem, named "Air Cargo Load Planning with Routing, Pickup, and Delivery Problem" (ACLP+RPDP), is mathematically modelled using standardised pallets in fixed positions. We developed a strategy to solve this problem, considering historical transport data from some Brazilian hub networks, and performed several experiments with a commercial solver, five known meta-heuristics, and a new heuristic designed specifically for this problem. By using a portable computer, our strategy quickly found practical solutions to a wide range of real problems in much less than operationally acceptable time.