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 be consolidated to a reduced number of trains without jeopardizing on time deliveries. An important problem continuously arising during the daily operations of a transshipment yard is the train scheduling problem, which decides on the succession of trains at the parallel railway tracks. This problem with a special focus on resolving deadlocks and avoiding multiple crane picks per container move is investigated within the paper on hand. A mathematical program along with a complexity proof is provided and exact (Dynamic Programming) and heuristic (Beam Search) procedures are described.