Air cargo transport by multi-agent based planning

K. Zhu, M.W. Ludema, R.E.C.M. van der Heijden
Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences  
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. This 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 solving this assignment are pointed out. After explaining the motivations for agent solution, we propose a robust
more » ... lution in which the flights are represented as agents and the cargo assignment is viewed as 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 planed shipments, and coalitions get along with available information so that the control principles can be fully performed and air capacity can be best managed.
doi:10.1109/hicss.2000.926673 dblp:conf/hicss/ZhuLH00 fatcat:o2atghzbyvhbdoyfs7d3nfphai