ULD Build-Up Scheduling with Dynamic Batching in an Air Freight Hub

Air freight is usually shipped in standardized unit load devices (ULDs). The planning process for the consolidation of transit cargo from inbound flights or locally emerging shipments into ULDs for outbound flights is called build-up scheduling. More specifically, outbound ULDs must be assigned a time and a workstation subject to both workstation capacity constraints and the availability of shipments which in turn depends on break-down decisions for incoming ULDs. ULDs scheduled for the same outbound flight should be built up in temporal and spatial proximity. This serves both to minimize overhead in transportation times and to allow workers to move freight between ULDs. We propose to address this requirement by processing ULDs for the same outbound flight in batches. For the above build-up scheduling problem, we introduce a multi-commodity network design model. Outbound flights are modeled as commodities; transit cargo is represented by cargo flow volume and unpack and batch decisions are represented as design variables. The model is solved with a standard MIP solver on a set of benchmark data. For instances with a limited number of resource conflicts, near-optimal solutions are found in under two hours for a whole week of operations.