Multi-site collaboration design for air cargo planning

The paper is about the design of an agent-based framework of multi-site cargo planning system for the air freight forwarding industry. Currently, most of the air freight forwarders still generate loading plans individually. We propose to streamline effectiveness of cargo handling with a multi-site collaborative solution. Our approach is based on the intelligent agent technology, bin packing heuristic and the inter-site workflow protocol. The major problems being tackled are (1) how to make the best estimation of the equipments required; (2) how to load the cargoes under the minimum cost in the standalone site case and (3) optimization of space and cargo loading cost under the multiple sites case. A prototype has been developed to illustrate the operation s of our framework.