| dc.description.abstract | In recent years, international air express carriers have grown rapidly. The markets become very competitive for the carriers. International air express carriers rather emphasize on time-definite deliveries. A good cargo container loading plan is therefore essential to international air express carriers’ operating cost, profit and competitive capability in the market. In Order to design a good cargo container loading plan, a carrier not only has to consider the airport operating cost and operations, but also has to consider the uncertainty of the market demand in actual operations. However, in current practice the cargo container loading plan is typically solved in a manual way with staff’s experience, which is neither effective nor efficient, especially for the environment involving large hubs and complicated network operations today. Considering stochastic daily market demands in actual operations, in this research, on the basis of the international air express carriers’ perspective, we try to develop a deterministic-demand and a stochastic-demand cargo container loading model, with the objective of minimizing the operating cost , subject to the related operating constraints. The models are expected to be useful planning tools for international air express carriers to decide on their optimal air cargo loading plans in their operations.
We employed mathematical programming techniques to construct the deterministic-demand cargo container loading model. Then, we further establish the stochastic-demand cargo container loading model by modifying the fixed demand parameters in the deterministic-demand cargo container loading model. These two models are expectedly formulated as nonlinear mixed integer programs that are characterized as NP-hard. We employed piece-wise linear functions, simulation techniques, coupled with a mathematical programming solver and computer programs to solve the problems. To evaluate the models and the solution algorithms under stochastic demands in actual operations, we developed a simulation-based evaluation method. Finally, to evaluate the models, the solution methods and the evaluation method in practice, we performed a case study on personal computers, using real operating data from an international air express carrier, with the assistance of C computer programs and the mathematical programming solver, CPLEX. Then show the conclusions and suggestions. | en_US |