Optimal Allocation of Container Freight Station

An air cargo terminal is an essential gateway to move goods for import shipping or to load goods for export shipping. The air cargo terminal provides high-quality physical cargo handling services for import, export, and transshipment cargo, with extensive space and standard operating procedures. Terminals must increase their import throughput to use available space and infrastructure efficiently. This study presents an approach merging ordinal optimization and golden jackal optimization to solve the optimal allocation of container freight stations in air cargo. Golden jackal optimization is a metaheuristic method replicating the golden jackals’ natural hunting behaviors. The developed approach is adopted to decide the optimal allocation of shipping/receiving dock in an air cargo terminal such that the long-term average waiting time of trucks is minimized. Simulation results show that the presented approach could improve the convergence speed and local and global search capabilities.