Air Cargo Facility Layout Planning and Meta-Heuristic Solution Approach

Abstract

In recent years, with the increase of world trade size, the importance of the Air Cargo operations has increased even more. The rapid progression of air cargo transportation has caused development of intralogistics systems, the establishment of new facilities, the installation of new material handling equipment and facilities layout design issues. Although it is possible to reduce the system costs and increase the total cargo handling capacity with the facility layout planning (FLP) algorithms; it has been observed that the FLP algorithms have not been used in the airway cargo facilities designs. In this study, the air cargo facility design issue has been tackled as layout problem. Firstly, the existing layout algorithms in the literature have been addressed and then, FLPs have been taken into the consideration with the BlocPlan layout construction that is integrated with the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm. In the application part of the study, the data of a major air cargo operator in Istanbul Airport data have been used and the transportation costs have been decreased with the proposed integrated FLP algorithm.