The ground handler dock capacitated pickup and delivery problem with time windows: A collaborative framework for air cargo operations

We study a typical problem within the air cargo supply chain, concerning the transportation of standard Unit Load Devices (ULDs) from freight forwarders’ to ground handlers’ warehouses. First, ULDs are picked up by a set of available trucks at the freight forwarders’ premises within a time window. Next, they are delivered to the ground handlers, also within a time window, and discharged according to a Last In First Out (LIFO) policy. Due to space constraints, ground handlers have limited capacity to serve the trucks and waiting times may arise, especially in case freight forwarders do not coordinate their operations. Therefore, in this paper we consider a cooperative framework where this transportation is coordinated by a central planner. The goal of the planner is to find a proper routing and scheduling that minimizes the sum of the transportation and waiting times at the ground handlers’ warehouses, while satisfying the capacity of the trucks. We propose two mathematical formulations, one based on the routing and the other based on the packing aspect of the problem. To solve large instances of the problem, an Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search algorithm is also developed. With numerical experiments, we compare the performances of the two models and the metaheuristic, and we quantify the benefits of the proposed framework to reduce waiting times.