Optimizing Air Cargo load planning

Abstract

Major changes appeared in the air cargo transportation industry during these last years. On the one hand, manufacturing companies have adopted new procurement strategies. These strategies impose that the goods transportation is realized in a fast and efficient way. On the other hand, the emergence of “low-cost” airlines increases the level of competition in this sector. Airlines are now looking for optimizing the loading of their aircrafts to meet their customers’ expectations in terms of efficiency, but also to cut in their expenses to face this high level of competition. In order to reach these two objectives, airlines put pressure on aviation-handling companies that are in charge of preparing aircraft loading. Nowadays, these companies face difficulties to optimize the air cargo load planning mainly due to the complexity of this task. Actually, people in charge of load planning have to do it manually. Seeing the large number of constraints that have to be fulfilled to approve a load plan, they are only able to offer safe flights and not efficient ones. In this matter, the goal of this project-dissertation is to analyse the possible advantages that an auto-load software can offer to aviation-handling companies, and more specifically to AviaPartner. The solution developed by the Centre for Quantitative methods and Operations Management from HEC-ULg (OPAL - Optimized Planning for Aircraft Loading) has been tested in the framework of the historical data available at AviaPartner Liege. The findings showed that major economic savings can be realized by using this type of software. Firstly, the preparation time needed to create the load plan of a commercial aircraft is decreased from about 30 minutes to 5 minutes. Secondly, the fuel consumption is diminished since the aerodynamic performances are improved thanks to a better position of the centre of gravity of the aircraft. Finally, in case of multi-destination flights, handling operations at intermediate airports are reduced due to better location of the different containers inside the aircraft. These three major savings can be translated into costs reduction for airlines as a result of more efficient flights.