Assigning airport ground handling operations: a data‐driven matheuristic

Abstract In this paper, we study a problem in the crossover between vehicle routing and scheduling problems. The multi‐trip capacitated vehicle routing and scheduling problem with time windows and meal breaks is extended to a heterogeneous fleet of trucks and drivers, with qualifications and different loading patterns. We propose an optimisation model that solves the problem in reasonable time for small instances. Then, we introduce two heuristics in order to deal with real‐life cases: a greedy heuristic and a matheuristic extension, the latter building upon exact methods to solve parts of the problem. We tested our algorithms on multiple new real‐life instances on U.S. airports. Our computational study compares the effectiveness of each approach and asserts the strength of our matheuristic. Moreover, we implemented our algorithms to help ground handlers specialised in catering operations to speed up the decision‐making process of assigning hundreds of tasks every day, with conclusive results.