Impact of passenger unused baggage capacity on air cargo delivery

Air cargo demand has strong growth owing to the international trade, especially the popularity of e-commerce. Currently, many giant carriers have their own aircraft, operating their own air cargo flights to efficiently facilitate their operations, shorten the delivery lead time, and expand their service network level. Meanwhile, they also deliver by using passenger flights operated by passenger airlines, e.g., Cathay Pacific, British Airway. In practice, passenger airlines usually reserve certain capacity on each passenger flight for the storage of passengers’ baggage. However, in reality, this capacity usually may not be fully utilized and result in unused space. Thus, the objective of this paper is to analyze how much efficiency can be obtained by using the unused baggage capacity for cargo delivery. To tackle this air cargo demands-to-flights assignment problem, a new hybrid genetic algorithm is proposed. The optimization algorithm makes use of the genetic algorithm for optimization of the demands-to-flights assignment problem, while a labelling algorithm to determine the optimal path for indirect flight. Numerical experiments are conducted based on the real flight data of an international airline in Hong Kong. The results indicate that the delivery efficiency can be enhanced.