Modeling and Heuristically Solving Group Train Operation Scheduling for Heavy-Haul Railway Transportation

Weiya Chen (), Qinyu Zhuo and Lu Zhang
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Weiya Chen: School of Traffic and Transportation Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410075, China
Qinyu Zhuo: School of Traffic and Transportation Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410075, China
Lu Zhang: School of Traffic and Transportation Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410075, China

Mathematics, 2023, vol. 11, issue 11, 1-15

Abstract: In light of the improvements to the capacity and timeliness of heavy-haul railway transportation that can be organized through group trains originating at a technical station, we address a group train operation scheduling problem with freight demand importance via a newly proposed mixed integer programming model and a simulated annealing algorithm. The optimization objective of the mixed integer programming model is to minimize the weighted sum of the transportation cost and the total cargo travel time under the condition of matching freight supply and demand within the optimization period. The main constraints are extracted from the supply and demand relations, the cargo delivery time commitment, the maintenance time, and the number of locomotives. A simulated annealing algorithm was constructed to generate the grouping scheme, the stopping scheme and the running schedule of group trains. A numerical experiment based on a real heavy-haul railway configuration was employed to verify the efficacy of the proposed model and heuristics algorithm. The results show that the proposed methodology can achieve high-quality solutions. The case results reveal that the freight volume increased by 2.03%, the departure cost decreased by CNY 337,000, the transportation cost which results from the difference in the supply and demand matching increased by CNY 27,764, and the total cargo travel time decreased by 40.9%, indicating that group train operation can create benefits for both railway enterprises and customers.

Keywords: heavy-haul railway; group train; operation scheduling; multi-objective optimization; simulated annealing algorithm (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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