Abstract
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.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a grant (NSC 93-2211-E-008-022) from the National Science Council of Taiwan. We would like to thank the cargo terminal for providing the test data and for valuable opinions on this research. We also thank the editor and the two anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions which greatly improved the presentation of this paper.
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Yan, S., Chen, CH. & Chen, CK. Short-term shift setting and manpower supplying under stochastic demands for air cargo terminals. Transportation 35, 425–444 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-007-9151-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-007-9151-7