Modeling an Air Cargo Shipment Planning Problem Including Risk Factors, Consolidations, Integrations, and Divisible Activities

In this chapter, an air cargo shipment planning problem is considered by including individual risk factors of any sub-contracted agents. Due to competitive market conditions, air cargo forwarders are advised to remain flexible in operations. A mixed integer linear programming formulation including the potential for divisible activities is developed to model the shipment planning problem. To solve this complicated problem, we employ an ant colony optimization (ACO) methodology. Numerical examples are generated using data from both the extant literature and from a global air cargo company, allowing investigation of the viability of the novel methodology. We find that the algorithm/methodology provides effective solutions for small problem sizes.