Scheduling Freight Trains in Rail-Rail Transshipment Yards

Authors:
Nils Boysen;Florian Jaehn;Erwin Pesch
Affiliations:
Lehrstuhl für Allgemeine Betriebswirtschaftslehre/Operations Management, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, D-07743 Jena, Germany;Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik, Universität Siegen, D-57068 Siegen, Germany;Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik, Universität Siegen, D-57068 Siegen, Germany
Venue:
Transportation Science
Year:
2011

Citing 8
Cited 5

The train marshalling problem

Discrete Applied Mathematics
Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness

Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness
A Survey of Optimization Models for Train Routing and Scheduling

Transportation Science
Models and Algorithms for Container Allocation Problems on Trains in a Rapid Transshipment Shunting Yard

Transportation Science
Shunting of Passenger Train Units in a Railway Station

Transportation Science
A stochastic beam search for the berth allocation problem

Decision Support Systems
Beam-ACO: hybridizing ant colony optimization with beam search: an application to open shop scheduling

Computers and Operations Research
A tabu search heuristic for the quay crane scheduling problem

Journal of Scheduling

New bounds and algorithms for the transshipment yard scheduling problem

Journal of Scheduling
How to park freight trains on rail---rail transshipment yards: the train location problem

OR Spectrum
Positioning of loading units in a transshipment yard storage area

OR Spectrum
MLP accompanied beam search for the resonance assignment problem

Journal of Heuristics
A Survey on Container Processing in Railway Yards

Transportation Science

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Transshipment yards, where gantry cranes enable the efficient transfer of containers between freight trains, are important entities in modern railway systems. They facilitate a general shift from point-to-point transport to hub-and-spoke railway systems, a shift being driven by concerted efforts within the European Union (EU) to transfer goods traffic from road to rail. Modern rail-rail transshipment yards accelerate container handling so that multiple smaller trains, with identical destinations, can be consolidated onto a reduced number of trains. An important problem attendant upon the daily operations of a transshipment yard is the train-scheduling problem, which involves determining the processing order of trains at parallel railway tracks. The present paper investigates this problem, with a special focus on resolving deadlocks and avoiding multiple crane picks per container move. A mathematical program along with a complexity proof is provided, and two different procedures are described: exact (dynamic programming) and heuristic (beam search).