Scheduling and Routing Algorithms for Rail Freight Transportation

Integration of Passenger and Freight Rail Scheduling

In the United States, the freight railway industry is already running without much excess capacity. Hence, better planning and scheduling tools are needed to effectively manage the scarce resources, to cope with the rapidly increasing demand for railway transportation. The integration of freight train and passenger train scheduling and dispatching is an important railroad management task since ...

Single-Car Routing in Rail Freight Transport

Cars in rail freight service follow prescribed routes from their origin via intermediate shunting yards to their destination. The goal in designing such routes is to reduce the number of trains and their travel distances. Various real-world hard constraints make the problem difficult to formulate and also to solve. We present integer programming formulations for this car routing problem arising...

Routing Cars in Rail Freight Service

Scheduling Freight Trains in Rail-Rail Transshipment Yards

Transshipment yards, where gantry cranes allow for an e cient transshipment of containers between di erent freight trains, are important entities in modern railway systems and facilitate the general shift from point-to-point transport to hub-and-spoke railway systems. Modern rail-rail transshipment yards accelerate container handling, so that multiple smaller trains with equal destination can b...

Scheduled Service Network Design for Freight Rail Transportation

The paper addresses the scheduled service network design problem for freight rail transportation. The proposed model integrates service selection and scheduling, car classification and blocking, train make up, and routing of time-dependent customer shipments, based on a cyclic three-layer space-time network representation of the associated operations and decisions, their relations and time dime...