Page 196 - IJOCTA-15-4

An International Journal of Optimization and Control: Theories & Applications
ISSN: 2146-0957 eISSN: 2146-5703
Vol.15, No.4, pp.738-749 (2025)
https://doi.org/10.36922/IJOCTA025220109

RESEARCH ARTICLE

FastLoader: Leveraging large language models to accelerate cargo
loading optimization with numerous loading constraints

1†
2†
1
2
2
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2
Yunlai Cheng , Zheng Chen , Siqi Du , Meng Yu , Dongzhou Zhao , Xinran Li , Yue Han , Zhe
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1
2
Ouyang , Yinglong Wang , Jing Chen , Ying Guo , Chi Harold Liu , and Rui Han 1*
1 School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China
2 TravelSky Technology Limited, Beijing, China
3
Shandong Computer Science Center (National Supercomputer Center in Jinan)
and Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences), Jinan, Shandong, China
chenzh@travelsky.com.cn, 3120230948@bit.edu.cn, siqiqia@sina.com, myu@travelsky.com.cn,
dzhzhao@travelsky.com.cn, lixinran@travelsky.com.cn, yuehan@travelsky.com.cn, ouyangzhe@travelsky.com.cn,
wangyinglong@qlu.edu.cn, jingchen94@163.com, guoying@sdas.org, chiliu@bit.edu.cn, hanrui@bit.edu.cn
ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT
Article History:
Received: May 31, 2025 With the unquestionable commercial success of air cargo transportation, cargo
1st revised: July 24, 2025 loading is a crucial step that selects the optimal placement solution for a
2nd revised: September 2, 2025 given aircraft hold and a set of cargoes. This combinatorial optimization
Accepted: September 3, 2025 promotes airlines’ revenue (e.g., minimizing fuel consumption) with the en-
Published Online: September 19, 2025 coded constraints in the solution space. In practical scenarios, cargo loading
includes dozens of loading constraints (e.g., isolation of dangerous cargoes).
Keywords:
However, existing techniques either over-simplify such constraints due to the
Cargo loading
expensive manual modeling in combinatorial optimization, or suffer from a
Combinatorial optimization
time-consuming optimization process due to the large search space in heuris-
Optimization acceleration
tic search. In this paper, we present FastLoader, an optimization acceleration
Loading constraints
approach that employs large language models (LLMs) to distinguish critical
Large language model
structural patterns in the simulated cargo loading data while still scaling to
AMS Classification 2010: numerous loading constraints in real scenarios. FastLoader’s key design fea-
26A33; 34A08; 35H15; 34K50 tures are the following: (i) a cargo loading constructor, which converts the
47H10; 60H10 information of both cargo types and loading constraints into pre-defined data
structures, thus avoiding manual modeling and improving solution accuracy;
(ii) a cargo loading solver and a search space reducer, which work together to
effectively reduce search space and accelerate the optimization process. We
evaluate the proposed approach using a list of practical scenarios from in-
dustry transportation systems, and the results show the followin: FastLoader
improves accuracy by 10% compared to combinatorial optimization, and re-
duces the optimization time by 90% with 1.5% accuracy losses compared to
heuristic search.

1. Introduction air cargo loading is an industrial process of load-
ing air cargoes (e.g., unit loading devices, bulk
cargo, and special goods) onto flights (e.g., wide-
The rapid development of air cargo body and narrow-body aircraft cargo holds) in
transportation 1,2 makes the air cargo loading a three steps. The first step is to process and pre-
promising research field. As shown in Figure 1, pare cargoes for transformation. The second step
†
These authors contributed equally to this work.
*Corresponding Authors
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