A Freight Service Design Problem for a Railway Corridor

Alberto Caprara (), Enrico Malaguti () and Paolo Toth ()
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Alberto Caprara: Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informatica e Sistemistica, University of Bologna, 40136 Bologna, Italy
Enrico Malaguti: Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informatica e Sistemistica, University of Bologna, 40136 Bologna, Italy
Paolo Toth: Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informatica e Sistemistica, University of Bologna, 40136 Bologna, Italy

Transportation Science, 2011, vol. 45, issue 2, 147-162

Abstract: We study the problem of designing a set of highly profitable freight routes in a railway corridor, taking into account the level of service requested by different goods; in particular, the profit achieved by transporting a good is a nonlinear function of the associated travel time. We propose an ILP model that is solved heuristically by column generation and fixing techniques. Computational results on a real corridor crossing 11 European countries are reported, showing that we can find solutions that are provably close to optimal. Given the large size of our instances, a key issue of our approach is to avoid finding an optimal solution of the continuous relaxation of our model, stopping as soon as near-optimal primal and dual solutions are available.

Keywords: service design; ILP formulation; column generation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ortrsc:v:45:y:2011:i:2:p:147-162

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