  Airlift operations require the timely distribution of various cargo, much of
which is time sensitive and valuable. However, these operations have to contend
with sudden disruptions from weather and malfunctions, requiring immediate
rescheduling. The Airlift Challenge competition seeks possible solutions via a
simulator that provides a simplified abstraction of the airlift problem. The
simulator uses an OpenAI gym interface that allows participants to create an
algorithm for planning agent actions. The algorithm is scored using a remote
evaluator against scenarios of ever-increasing difficulty. The second iteration
of the competition was underway from November 2023 to April 2024. In this
paper, we describe the competition and simulation environment. As a step
towards applying generalized planning techniques to the problem, we present a
temporal PDDL domain for the Pickup and Delivery Problem, a model which lies at
the core of the Airlift Challenge.
