A decision making tool considering risk assessment of sub-contracting agents for an air cargo shipment planning problem

Development of an efficient shipment plan for air cargo forwarders is a critical to obtaining considerable integration and consolidation savings and to meeting competitive requirements such as target costs. In this paper, we propose a decision making tool to solve a deterministic air cargo shipment planning problem with risk assessment of sub-contracting agents evaluating possible consolidations and integrations. The decision making tool consists of a risk assessment module based on historical data and a shipment planning module that includes a genetic algorithm (GA). Various benchmark instances are generated based on real life data obtained from a worldwide air cargo company to investigate the performance of the proposed methodology. In conclusion, the proposed methodology provide effective solutions in terms of solution quality and computational time.