A routing and consolidation decision model for containerized air-land intermodal operations

The study aims to provide the decision support for airfreight forwarders regarding the air-land intermodal operation, for which shipments are transported to gateway airports by air transportation and then delivered to final destinations by trucking service. A mixed integer programming model has been formulated to tackle the integrated routing and consolidation decision, given the various types of air containers. This study has designed an approximate solution algorithm based on Lagrangian Relaxation. In the numerical experiment, the solution algorithm can achieve an objective function value very close to optimality or the Lagrangian lower bound within an acceptable computation time.