Short-term shift setting and manpower supplying under stochastic demands for air cargo terminals

A good air cargo terminal manpower supply plan helps terminals deal efficiently with their cargos and reduces their operating costs. To design a good air cargo terminal manpower supply plan, a terminal has to consider not only its operating costs, but also the uncertainty of the manpower demand in a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Transportation (Dordrecht) 2008-05, Vol.35 (3), p.425-444
Main Authors: Yan, Shangyao, Chen, Chia-Hung, Chen, Chung-Kai
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Air transportation and traffic
Applied sciences
Case studies
Economic Geography
Economics
Economics and Finance
Engineering Economics
Exact sciences and technology
Flexible strategy
Ground, air and sea transportation, marine construction
Innovation/Technology Management
Integer program
Logistics
Manpower
Manpower supply
Marketing
Mass transit
Mathematical programming
Operating costs
Organization
Planning
Regional/Spatial Science
Scheduling
Simulation
Stochastic demand
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Summary:A good air cargo terminal manpower supply plan helps terminals deal efficiently with their cargos and reduces their operating costs. To design a good air cargo terminal manpower supply plan, a terminal has to consider not only its operating costs, but also the uncertainty of the manpower demand in actual operations. However, most air cargo terminals in Taiwan currently depend on staff experience with a fixed demand when establishing the manpower supply plan, which is neither effective nor efficient. We have developed two stochastic-demand manpower supply plan models for air cargo terminals that can resolve stochastic demands occurring in practice. The objectives of both models are to minimize the total man-hour cost, subject to the related operating constraints. The models are formulated as integer/mixed integer linear programs. To evaluate the two stochastic-demand models under stochastic demands, we have also developed two deterministic-demand manpower supply plan models, by suitably modifying two stochastic-demand models, respectively, and an evaluation method. Here, we perform a case study using real operating data from a Taiwan air cargo terminal. The preliminary results are good, showing that the models could be useful for planning air cargo terminal manpower supply.
ISSN:0049-4488
1572-9435
DOI:10.1007/s11116-007-9151-7