Air Cargo Scheduling Part II: Solution Procedures and Computational Results

摘要

This is the second part of our publication devoted to the Air Cargo Scheduling Problem (ACSP). Part I introduced the fundamentals of air cargo scheduling, a pragmatic planning paradigm which draws upon a list of optional and mandatory flights, as well as integrated mathematical models and several extensions. In this second part, we first describe in detail the solution procedure which we have implemented for solving these integrated models. After a short introduction, we give a bird's eye view on our specific branch&price&cut procedure in section. Then, we discuss implementation details and issues of the main modules in the subsequent sections, i.e. how we solve the pricing problems, which branching strategies are applied,and which cutting planes are generated. Furthermore, we report on extensive computational tests carried out on generated yet realistic problem problem instances representing different airline types and planning scenarios. Specifically, we analyze the results of solving the ACSP using the integrated model ASCP-T with and without maintenance constraints. Finally, the paper concludes with a brief review of our work and opportunities for future research. Note that we refer to Part I of our work for the notations and models used throughout this paper.