Recently, CAAC (Civil Aviation Administration of China) issued Typical Practices of Smart Logistics (IB-TR-2024-01), which includes China Postal Airlines’ projects of “Centralized Load Control System” and “RFID System for Postal Cargo Weight Collection and Verification”.

The aviation logistics industry is an important underpinning of the modern industrial system, and plays a significant role in building a robust domestic market, deeply participating in international division of labor and cooperation, ensuring the stability of the international supply chains, supporting the implementation of major national strategies, and achieving high-quality economic development. Currently, in the context of a new round of technological revolution, information technology such as big data and artificial intelligence is widely used in the field of air logistics, and new business modes and forms of smart logistics such as Internet-based freight forwarding and digital warehousing are constantly emerging. Typical Practices of Smart Logistics collects 29 typical cases of smart logistics in aviation industry, covering such fields as operation guarantee, risk management and control, comprehensive information platform and smart cargo terminals.

Taking the information approach and focusing on the load control process, the centralized load control system integrates the ground operations of China Postal Airlines through technologies such as the Internet, RFID, mobile platform and the independently developed load message model. It meets the management and technological needs of the air express network, and forges the entire operations into a digital, paperless and dynamic process with the characteristics of China Postal Airlines. Consequently, it has enabled scientific, systematic and efficient production and operations, achieved unified load control standards, made human resources reasonably allocated and operating costs reduced, and effectively improved the quality of weight and balance operation and the safety of the flight. Through the centralized load control system, China Postal Airlines has developed a new operating mode for ground support. Fully leveraging the advantages of wireless PDAs and Bluetooth printers, it has greatly improved flight safety, guaranteed transportation time limit, and ensured that mail items processed by Nanjing Distribution Center can be dispatched to flights in time.

With RFID, the postal cargo weight collection and verification system has enabled automatic collection, association and transmission of the containers’ weight information as well as the automatic printing of the tags. With a concise architecture, the system contains a weight collection unit and a gate-in/gate-out message collection unit, covering the entire process of data collection, information transmission and automated operation.