Air intermodal freight transportation: The freight forwarder service problem

摘要

Despite being one of the most relevant figures in international multimodal transportation, freight forwarding companies optimization problems did not receive much attention from the research community. In this work we try to fill this gap by presenting the general features of air transportation from the freight forwarder's perspective and we introduce the air transportation freight forwarder service problem (ATFFSP). A MILP formulation of the problem is proposed and tested on real-life data coming from an Italian freight forwarding company. We study the performance of the model in terms of optimality gap and time needed to reach the optimal solution. Furthermore we compare the solutions found with the ones provided by the company in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the model and its ability to find good and practical solutions. Finally, we study the possibility of opening a new warehouse facility to better manage services and we analyze the corresponding potential benefits. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.