Improving landside operations of an air cargo terminal

This paper deals with the triplet issue of shipment consolidation, route planning and capacity-constrained pick-up and delivery nodes, due to a limited number of loading/unloading docks, with dynamic and stochastic arrivals of goods to an air cargo terminal. Because of the complexity, interconnection and interdependency of all three problems, a policy-based approach for solving the system-wide problem is considered. Results from a discrete-event simulation model show that a policy based on consolidating shipments from the point of view of the ground handlers, which are the nodes with the highest workload, is the policy with the best compromise between total distance travelled and average shipment throughput times.