Dynamic routing of time‐sensitive air cargo using real‐time information

The route planning of time‐sensitive air‐cargo is becoming more important with the growing air‐network congestion and delays. We consider a freight forwarder’s routing of a time‐sensitive air‐cargo in the presence of real‐time and historical information regarding flight availability, departure delays and travel times. A departure delay estimation model is developed to account for real‐time information inaccuracy. A novel Markov decision model is formulated and solved with online backward induction. Through synthetic experiments and case studies, we demonstrate that dynamic routing with real‐time information can improve delivery reliability and reduce expected cost.