Joint scheduling of material handling equipment in automated air cargo terminals

This paper develops a joint approach to solve the problem of integrated scheduling of different types of material handling equipment in a typical automated air cargo handling system. Due to the nature of the operations, the schedules for different cooperating equipment are highly interactive. In order to formally describe the interactive properties of cooperating equipment, an event framework for the specification of an automated cargo handling system and a model for the integrated scheduling for more than one type of cooperating equipment is developed. A heuristic algorithm, known as the extended maximum-matching algorithm (EMMA), is proposed to solve the joint scheduling problem. The performance of the proposed EMMA is evaluated via extensive numerical studies. Experimental results show that the EMMA can be readily adapted to real-world applications.