Scheduling Freight Trains in Rail-Rail Transshipment Yards

Nils Boysen (), Florian Jaehn () and Erwin Pesch ()
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Nils Boysen: Lehrstuhl für Allgemeine Betriebswirtschaftslehre/Operations Management, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, D-07743 Jena, Germany
Florian Jaehn: Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik, Universität Siegen, D-57068 Siegen, Germany
Erwin Pesch: Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik, Universität Siegen, D-57068 Siegen, Germany

Transportation Science, 2011, vol. 45, issue 2, 199-211

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).

Keywords: railway systems; transshipment yard; train scheduling; dynamic programming; beam search (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ortrsc:v:45:y:2011:i:2:p:199-211

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