Air Cargo Transportation, Loading, and Phase-Based Maintenance Service Scheduling in Demand Channel Routes

The article proposes an approach for modeling and solving the air cargo transportation, loading, and phase-based maintenance scheduling problems in an integrated fashion. It describes the demand channel routing strategy to meet the earliest pickup and delivery requirements in emergency logistics. The problem has unique characteristics such as task integrity and priority, demand node revisit, partial refueling, and short to long-haul maintenance procedures that take cargo planes out of service for a certain period, necessitating maintenance scheduling requirements in the fleet selection and route construction. As a result, air cargo transportation and maintenance scheduling problem is written using the language of MILP. We propose a sequential insertion heuristic for producing a near-optimal solution for this integrated problem. Our insertion procedure has been shown to have very high computational performance, with an average 1.32 percent optimality gap. It can be scaled up to the most critical cargo mission, with up to 190 ports, 95 aircraft, and 380 tasks