A matheuristic approach to the air-cargo recovery problem under demand disruption

Felipe Delgado and Julio Mora

Journal of Air Transport Management, 2021, vol. 90, issue C

Abstract: Air cargo transport is subject to unpredictable changes in expected demand, necessitating adjustments to itinerary planning to recover from such disruptions. We study a flight rescheduling problem to react to cargo demand disruptions in the short run. To increase flexibility, we consider two different cargo assignment policies. We propose a matheuristic approach to solve the problem that provides high-quality solutions in a short computational time, based on column generation in which each subproblem is solved using an ad-hoc heuristic. The approach is tested on demand disruption instances containing up to 75 air cargo orders with different penalty levels. The results show that the proposed method improves profit by 54% over the solution generated by a commercial MIP solver within a 1-h time limit, and by 15% over the solution with the routes fixed as in the original flight planning that only allows cargo to be re-routed. We also show that there exist incremental benefits in the range of 3–5% by allowing cargo for a given order to be transported by various aircraft.

Keywords: Air cargo schedule recovery; Airline schedule recovery; Disruption management; Air cargo rescheduling; Column generation; Matheuristic (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0969699720305226
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jaitra:v:90:y:2021:i:c:s0969699720305226

DOI: 10.1016/j.jairtraman.2020.101939

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Air Transport Management is currently edited by Anne Graham

More articles in Journal of Air Transport Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().