Air Cargo Pickup and Delivery Problem with Alternative Access Airports

Continuous growth in air cargo deliveries and increasing competition is necessitating freight forwarders to develop innovative solutions to improve performance and reduce costs. This study considers a freight forwarder's operational implementation of alternative access airport policy in a multi-airport region for air cargo transportation. Given a set of heterogeneous air cargo customers, the forwarder's problem is to simultaneously select air cargo flight itineraries and schedule the pickup and delivery of customer loads to the airport(s). This problem is formulated as a novel pickup and delivery problem, where the delivery cost is both destination and time dependent. An efficient solution method based on Lagrangian decomposition and variable target method with backtracking is developed. Results of computational experiments and a practical case study in the Southern California demonstrate the merits of the model and show that the proposed algorithm is very efficient and obtains near-optimal solutions.