The Airline Container Loading Problem with Pickup and Delivery

The present paper looks into the problem of optimizing the loading of a set of containers and pallets into cargo aircraft serving multiple airports. Due to the pickup and delivery operations occurring at intermediate airports, this problem is simultaneously a weight and balance problem and a sequencing problem. Our objective is to minimize fuel and handling operations costs. This problem is shown to be NP-hard. We resort to a mixed integer linear program. On the basis of a professional partner's real-world data, TNT Airways, we perform numerical experiments using a standard B&C library. This approach yields better solutions than traditional manual planning, which results in substantial cost savings.