Optimizing the Cargo Express Service of Swiss Federal Railways

  • Authors:

  • Alberto Ceselli;Michael Gatto;Marco E. Lübbecke;Marc Nunkesser;Heiko Schilling

  • Affiliations:

  • Dipartimento di Tecnologie dell'Informazione, Università degli Studi di Milano, 26013 Crema, Italy;Department of Computer Science, ETH Zürich, 8092 Zürich, Switzerland;Technische Universität Berlin, Institut für Mathematik, 10623 Berlin, Germany;Department of Computer Science, ETH Zürich, 8092 Zürich, Switzerland;Technische Universität Berlin, Institut für Mathematik, 10623 Berlin, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Transportation Science
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

The Cargo Express service of Swiss Federal Railways (SBB Cargo) offers fast overnight transportation of goods between selected train stations in Switzerland and is operated as a hub-and-spoke system with two hubs. We present three different models for planning the operation of this service as a whole. All models capture the underlying optimization problem with a high level of detail: Traffic routing, train routing, makeup, scheduling, and locomotive assignment are all addressed. At the same time we respect hard constraints like tight service time windows and train capacities, and we avoid hub overloading. We describe our approaches for obtaining provably good quality solutions. Our algorithmic techniques involve branch-and-cut, branch-and-price, and problem-specific exact and heuristic acceleration methods. We conclude our study with computational results on realistic data.