Intelligent algorithms applied to the prediction of air freight transportation delays

PurposeThe objective of this paper is to evaluate whether the data from consignors, logistics service providers (LSPs) and consignees contribute to the prediction of air transport shipment delays in a machine learning application.Design/methodology/approachThe research database contained 2,244 air freight intercontinental shipments to 4 automotive production plants in Latin America. Different algorithm classes were tested in the knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) process: support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), artificial neural networks (ANN) and k-nearest neighbors (KNN).FindingsShipper, consignee and LSP data attribute selection achieved 86% accuracy through the RF algorithm in a cross-validation scenario after a combined class balancing procedure.Originality/valueThese findings expand the current literature on machine learning applied to air freight delay management, which has mostly focused on weather, airport structure, flight schedule, ground delay and congestion as explanatory attributes.