Air cargo transport by multi-agent based planning

Abstract

Most major airlines decide to take new strategies for the competition in the air cargo industry. They are concerned with assigning cargo over flights in creative ways. The paper considers the multi-agent solution for cargo assignment. First we present cargo control principles and introduce the pipelining assignment concept, then the difficulties of traditional operations research for solving this assignment are pointed out. After explaining the motivations for an agent solution, we propose a robust solution in which the flights are represented as agents and the cargo assignment is viewed as a coalition formation process among these agents. Finally, future perspectives are summarized. The main solution idea is that the agents communicate and cooperate with each other to form the best coalitions of delivering the planned shipments, and coalitions get along with available information so that the control principles can be fully performed and air capacity can be best managed.