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Title:

Simultaneous Optimization of Railcar Itinerary and Train Formation Plan

Accession Number:

01661224

Record Type:

Component

Abstract:

An essential issue a freight transportation system faced is how to deliver shipments (OD pairs) on a capacitated physical network optimally; that is, to determine the best physical path for each OD pair and assign each OD pair into the most reasonable freight train service sequence. Instead of pre-specifying or pre-solving the railcar routing beforehand and optimizing the train formation plan subsequently, which is a standard practice in China railway system and a widely used method in existing literature, this paper proposes a non-linear binary programming model to address the integrated railcar itinerary and train formation plan optimization problem. The model comprehensively considers various operational requirements and a set of capacity constraints, including link capacity, yard reclassification capacity and the maximal number of blocks a yard can be formed, while trying to minimize the total costs of accumulation, reclassification and transportation. An efficient simulated annealing based heuristic solution approach is developed to solve the mathematical model. The authors use a penalty function method to tackle the difficult capacity constraints and a customized method for the operational requirements. To demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach, a large-scale real-world case study consisting up to 127 yards and 14,440 shipments after preprocessing is carried out. Computational results validate the method and the authors have provided the results to railway practitioners as a useful decision support.

Supplemental Notes:

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AR040 Standing Committee on Freight Rail Transportation.

Report/Paper Numbers:

18-02027

Language:

English

Authors:

Lin, Boliang
Wang, Jiaxi
Lin, Ruixi
Liu, Chang
Xiao, Jie
Liu, Siqi
Wu, Jianping

Pagination:

6p

Publication Date:

2018

Conference:

Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting

Location: Washington DC, United States
Date: 2018-1-7 to 2018-1-11
Sponsors: Transportation Research Board

Media Type:

Digital/other

Features:

Figures; References

Geographic Terms:

China

Subject Areas:

Freight Transportation; Planning and Forecasting; Railroads; Vehicles and Equipment

Source Data:

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2018 Paper #18-02027

Files:

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Created Date:

Jan 8 2018 10:30AM