Within the framework of the promotion of the environmental friendly modes, the European Commission has launched a number of research projects aiming at evaluating technical and organisational innovations that can improve the performance of the freight transport operations in the rail sector. The scope of this paper is to present a modelling approach focusing on the comparative evaluation of con...

We present a new model for a strategic locomotive scheduling problem arising at the Deutsche Bahn AG. The model is based on a multi-commodity min-cost flow formulation that is also used for public bus scheduling problems. However, several new aspects have to be additionally taken into account, such as cyclic departures of the trains, time windows on starting and arrival times, network-load depe...

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...