Offshore consolidation centre for air cargo operations: model and solution methods

Xin Chu (), Yuan Wang (), Yun Hui Lin () and Ek Peng Chew ()
Additional contact information
Xin Chu: National University of Singapore
Yuan Wang: Singapore University of Social Sciences
Yun Hui Lin: Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)
Ek Peng Chew: National University of Singapore

OR Spectrum: Quantitative Approaches in Management, 2024, vol. 46, issue 4, No 9, 1295-1327

Abstract: Abstract Recent years have witnessed a surge in demand for air cargo transportation. Air cargo terminals initially built for handling the former demand volume start struggling with low operational efficiency and high congestion due to limited capacity. The industry has explored methods such as building new terminals and renting warehouses to stay competitive in the market. However, these methods may not be practical in many scenarios due to economic reasons and the scarcity of airport land. As an alternative method, this paper investigates an innovative operational paradigm with the concept of Offshore Consolidation Centre (OCC) to deal with the imbalance between the surging demand and the limited capacity of air cargo terminals. We redesign air cargo terminal operations with the existence of OCC and formulate the problem as a mixed-integer linear program (MILP). We then propose a two-stage alternating algorithm embedded with a tailored metaheuristic to analyse the validity of our model and algorithm. Experiment results reveal that our alternating algorithm has the best performance compared with the solver and benchmark policies adopted in industrial practice. Moreover, the comparison with air cargo terminals without OCC demonstrates that OCC can reduce delays, cargo waiting time, and traffic flow, by a large margin.

Keywords: Air cargo; Offshore Consolidation Centre; Terminal operation; Alternating algorithm (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00291-024-00764-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:orspec:v:46:y:2024:i:4:d:10.1007_s00291-024-00764-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... research/journal/291

DOI: 10.1007/s00291-024-00764-0

Access Statistics for this article

OR Spectrum: Quantitative Approaches in Management is currently edited by Rainer Kolisch

More articles in OR Spectrum: Quantitative Approaches in Management from Springer, Gesellschaft für Operations Research e.V.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().