The Capacitated Air-Cargo Network Planning and Scheduling Problem with Multiple Flight Modes of Self-Owned Planes

The air-cargo industry has experienced rapid growth in recent years. With the increasing demand, more and more express companies are investing in expanding their cargo aircraft fleets. These companies need to organize the cargo flows and coordinate the self-owned planes with outsourcing services effectively to reduce operating costs. In this paper, we propose a novel mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulation for addressing the capacitated air-cargo network planning and scheduling problem. The model considers the triangle flight mode for self-owned planes, in addition to the round-trip mode, to better align with practical conditions. Numerical experiments reveal that incorporating the triangle flight mode can yield cost reductions of up to 17.35% under our instances. However, the benefits derived from coordinating hub location decisions with flow allocation and plane assignment are found to be negligible.