Warehouse design is critical in the air cargo industry, where service standards are high and competition is fierce. The designers of air cargo warehouses consider various criteria like costs, system failure risks, customer perception, and marketing power to evaluate alternative designs. The issue of designing an air cargo warehouse is generally considered by design and consulting companies, which have broad experience in operational design are lacking in suggesting robust alternatives that build upon on a well-structured theoretical framework. The alternative warehouse designs are generated by considering different combinations of resource capacities such as the number of gates, workstations and storage areas. The evaluation of these alternative designs requires the use of analytical methodologies for multi-criteria decision-making. At this point, two methodologies from literature may be helpful: (i) simulation, which is a popular tool to evaluate operational performance and (ii) the analytical hierarchy process (AHP), which provides the ability to evaluate qualitative as well as quantitative criteria. In this study, a flexible and user-friendly decision support system (DSS) is developed based on combining simulation and AHP. The DSS is used to generate design alternatives, evaluate their quantitative performance via simulation, and subsequently rank the best scoring ones via AHP according to a set of quantitative as well as qualitative decision criteria. The graphical interfaces are designed with a keen eye on man-machine interaction to increase their functionality. The environment is tested and validated with real-time data in one of Europe’s largest air cargo carriers.

在服务标准高、竞争激烈的航空货运行业，仓库设计至关重要。航空货运仓库的设计人员会考虑各种标准，例如成本、系统故障风险、客户感知和营销能力，以评估替代设计。设计和咨询公司通常会考虑设计航空货运仓库的问题，它们在运营设计方面拥有丰富的经验，但缺乏基于结构良好的理论框架提出可靠的替代方案。备选仓库设计是通过考虑资源容量的不同组合而产生的，例如大门、工作站和存储区域的数量。对这些替代设计的评估需要使用分析方法进行多标准决策。在此刻，文献中的两种方法可能会有所帮助：(i) 模拟，这是一种评估运营绩效的流行工具；(ii) 层次分析法 (AHP)，它提供了评估定性和定量标准的能力。在本研究中，基于仿真和层次分析法相结合，开发了一个灵活且用户友好的决策支持系统（DSS）。DSS 用于生成设计备选方案，通过模拟评估其定量性能，然后根据一组定量和定性决策标准通过 AHP 对得分最高的方案进行排名。图形界面的设计非常注重人机交互，以增加其功能。该环境在欧洲最大的航空货运公司之一中通过实时数据进行了测试和验证。