Managing disruption risk in express logistics via proactive planning

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to carry out a comprehensive review for state-of-the-art works in disruption risk management of express logistics mainly supported by air-transportation. The authors aim to suggest some new research directions and insights for express logistics practitioners to develop more robust planning in air-transportation. Design/methodology/approach – The authors mainly confined the research to papers published over the last two decades. The search process was conducted in two dimensions: horizontal and vertical. In the horizontal dimension, attention was paid to the evolution of disruption management across the timeline. In the vertical dimension, different foci and strategies of disruption management are employed to distinguish each article. Three keywords were used in the full text query: “Disruption management”, “Air transportation”, and “Airline Operations” in all database searches listed above. Duplications due to database overlap, articles other than those from academic journals, and papers in languages other than English were discarded. Findings – A total of 98 articles were studied. The authors categorized the papers into two broad categories: Reactive Recovery, and Proactive Planning. In addition, based on the problem characteristics and their application scenarios, a total of 11 sub-categories in reactive recovery and nine sub-categories in proactive planning were further identified. From the analysis, the authors identified some new categories in the air-transportation recovery. In addition, by analyzing the papers in robust planning, according to the problem characteristics and the state-of-the-art research in recovery problems, the authors proposed four new research directions to enhance the reliability and robustness of air-transportation express logistics. Research limitations/implications – This study provided a comprehensive and feasible taxonomy of disruption risk management. The classification scheme was based on the problem characteristics and the application scenarios, rather than the algorithms. One advantage of this scheme is that it enables an in-depth classification of the problem, that is, sub-categories of each class can be revealed, which provides a much wider and clearer horizon to the scientific progress in this area. This helps researchers to reveal the problem’s nature and to identify the future directions more systematically. The suggestions for future research directions also point out some critical research gaps and opportunities. Practical implications – This study summarized various reasons which account for the disruption in air-transportation. In addition, the authors suggested various considerations for express logistics practitioners to enhance logistics network reliability and efficiency. Originality/value – There are various classification schemes in the literature to categorize disruption management. Using different algorithms (e.g. exact algorithm, heuristics, meta-heuristics) and distinct characteristics of the problem elements (e.g. aircraft, crew, passengers, etc.) are the most common schemes in previous efforts to produce a disruption management classification scheme. However, the authors herein attempted to focus on the problem nature and the application perspective of disruption management. The classification scheme is hence novel and significant.

A Family of Heuristic-Based Inequalities for Maximizing Overall Safety Margins in Aircraft Parking Stands Arrangement Problems

“…Constraint sets (2)- (4) are bound constraints. Constraint (5) is a nonoverlapping constraint that separates each pair of aircraft by the safety margin n. Variables are binary and one of them must take value 1 if is activated in separating aircraft i and j. Constraint (12) prescribes that each aircraft must take a safety margin value within the prescribed bounds of each pair of 6 Mathematical Problems in Engineering aircraft. is the auxiliary variable used to activate/deactivate the revised NFP with safety margin n. Constraint (11) imposes the condition that there should be only one revised NFP activated to separate each pair of aircraft.…”

“…The aircraft maintenance problem can be viewed from different perspectives, including the airline company, the line maintenance service provider, the hangar maintenance service provider, and the military mission department [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. From the perspective of the aircraft service company, after receiving aircraft maintenance requests from a number of clients, one needs to consider which subset of maintenance requests to serve during a planning period to attain maximal profit, as well as to come up with an aircraft parking layout to minimize the risk of collision during the movement operations of the aircraft.…”

Managing sudden transportation disruptions in supply chains under delivery delay and quantity loss

“…They considered backorders, lost sales, and outsourcing options to generate optimal recovery plans. Other recent works related to developing supply disruption mitigation strategies can be found in Yang et al (2009), Li et al (2010, Shao and Dong (2012), Chung et al (2015), Guo et al (2013), Zhang et al (2013), Hu et al (2013), Yan et al (2014), Pal et al (2014, Ray and Jenamani (2016), Do et al (2016), Faghih-Roohi et al (2015), Mogre and D'Amico (2016), and Li et al (2015). Readers interested in supply disruption management are referred to Snyder et al (2016) and Paul et al (2016aPaul et al ( , 2017.…”

Using Ground Transportation for Aviation System Disruption Alleviation

“…A general review of airline system disruption risk management research is given in Chung et al [17]. Recently, there has been a shift towards passenger-centric rather than flight-centric metrics in air transportation disruption research, as reflected by the EC's 2050 goal [3,18,19,20,21,22].…”