Digital Technology in Air Cargo Transportation

The development of modern air transport is inextricably linked with the progressive growth of air cargo transportation volumes. The aviation industry is one of the most knowledge-intensive and sophisticated sectors of the economy. Accordingly, the technological processes taking place in the industry are based on the achievements of science and the improvement of information support, which takes a digital form. End-to-end digital technologies have found wide application in the development of the country’s civil aviation. The subject of the research in this article is the analysis of existing digital transformation technologies in organising the cargo transportation process. This process can be divided into the following stages: shipment booking and preparing relevant documents, cargo handling at the departure warehouse, delivery and loading on board an aircraft, transportation, unloading and delivery to the arrival warehouse, cargo handling at the arrival airport’s warehouse, and cargo delivery to the consignee. Each of these stages has a discrete set of operations, which together turn a discrete process into a continuous one. The main end-to-end digital technologies include big data; neurotechnology and artificial intelligence; distributed ledger systems; quantum technologies; new manufacturing technologies; industrial internet; robotics components and sensors; wireless communication technologies; virtual and augmented reality technologies. The problem set in the study is to analyse the world and domestic experience of applying digital transformation, some of the listed digital technologies in organising air cargo transportation, as well as to consider cargo hubs and. consequently, integration of cargo transportation. The solution to the problem involves the presence of constraints associated with the specifics of cargo transportation, since each mode of transport has its own characteristics associated with the processing of cargo flow, and organisation of the cargo yard activity of a railway station will differ from organisation of the cargo terminal of an airport.