Economies of Scale in Empty Freight Car Distribution in Scheduled Railways

Martin Joborn (), Teodor Gabriel Crainic (), Michel Gendreau (), Kaj Holmberg () and Jan T. Lundgren ()
Additional contact information
Martin Joborn: Carmen Consulting, Maria Bangata 6, SE-118 63, Stockholm, Sweden
Teodor Gabriel Crainic: Intelligent Transportation Systems Laboratory, Centre de recherche sur les transports, Université de Montréal, C.P. 8888, Succursale Centre-ville, Montréal, Québec, Canada H3C 3J7, and Département de management et technologie, École des Sciences de la Gestion, Université du Québec à Montréal, C.P. 6192, Succursale Centre-ville, Montréal, Québec, Canada H3C 4R2
Michel Gendreau: Centre de recherche sur les transports, and Département d'informatique et de recherche opérationnelle, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada H3C 3J7
Kaj Holmberg: Department of Mathematics, Linköping Institute of Technology, Linköping University, SE-581 83 Linköping, Sweden
Jan T. Lundgren: Department of Science and Technology, Campus Norrköping, Linköping University, SE-601 74 Norrköping, Sweden

Transportation Science, 2004, vol. 38, issue 2, 121-134

Abstract: In this paper, we consider empty freight car distribution in a scheduled railway system. We analyze the cost structure for the repositioning of empty cars, and conclude that the distribution cost shows an economy-of-scale behavior. In addition to the cost proportional to the number of cars sent from origin to destination, there is a cost related to car-handling operations at yards, which depends on the number of car groups that are handled. Thus, if we can find a transportation pattern in which fewer but larger groups of cars are built, the total distribution cost can be decreased.The objective of the paper is to propose an optimization model that explicitly takes this economy-of-scale effect into account. We use a time-dependent network to describe the possible car movements in time and space, and show how this network can be transformed into a network with fixed costs on links representing movements of cars with identical origin and destination terminals. The resulting optimization model is a capacitated network design model, where each capacity constraint limits the flow on several arcs. We describe a tabu heuristic for solving the model, and present computational results.

Keywords: empty freight car distribution; time-dependent capacitated network design; tabu search; scheduled railways (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/trsc.1030.0061 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ortrsc:v:38:y:2004:i:2:p:121-134

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Transportation Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().