Air cargo load and route planning in pickup and delivery operations

Military aviation faces risks of cargo unbalancing due to the urgency required on loading for rapid take-off and mission accomplishment, especially in times of crisis, armed conflict or public calamity. We model and solve the problem of planning the loading of an aircraft according to utility score, weight and balance principles, confer agility to pallet assembly under safety requirements, and also serving multiple bases in a tour of simultaneous Pickup and Delivery at intermediate airfields. This research result may be applicable by military and also by commercial companies in dynamic environments, especially on handling catastrophic events, sometimes as a government contractor. This problem encompasses four sub-problems: Air Palletization, Weight and Balance, Pickup and Delivery, and Sequencing. This hard problem, named Military Air Cargo Load Planning Problem, is mathematically modeled in real scenarios, using a standardized pallet, considering the possible presence of troops, ensures that torque and center of gravity constraints are obeyed, and each item is delivered to its destination. In our approach, we carry out experiments with a commercial solver, four well known meta-heuristics, and a proposed heuristic, on benchmarks based on statistical data from the Brazilian Air Force.