A Matheuristic for the Air Transportation Freight Forwarder Service Problem

Freight forwarding companies provide transportation services to shipping companies by organizing shipment of freights from origins to destinations. They typically handle long-haul intermodal transportation requiring synchronization among different transportation legs and modes as well as complex bureaucratic and administrative operations, like customs clearance for international transportation. Because of the complexity of these operations, shipper companies prefer to focus on their core business activities and are more and more relying on third parties to organize shipments. In this paper we focus on the freight forwarding activity where the main transportation mode is air transportation. The problem has been recently introduced in the literature and finds interesting practical applications related to the recent raise in air freight transportation due to fast delivery times requested by e-commerce customers. In this paper, we propose a matheuristic algorithm based on the construction of feasible routes from origins to destinations and on the solution of a set-partitioning formulation. Computational tests are made on instances proposed in the literature which are based on real data. The results show that the matheuristic is capable of offering good solutions for large size instances within reasonable computing times.