MIP models and a hybrid method for the capacitated air-cargo network planning and scheduling problems

Abstract

This paper examines hub location and plane assignment problems for the air-cargo delivery service. Two mixed integer programming models are constructed. Their difference lies in the way they control the number of visiting hubs for serving each O-D pair. Due to the NP-hardness of the problem, a two-stage hybrid algorithm is developed to solve large-scale instances. The first stage settles partial critical variables by heuristics and the second stage settles the rest of variables by a commercial solver. Based on the real-life data, numerical experiments are conducted to test the performance of the models and algorithm.