Optimization of Railway Freight Shunting

Markus Bohlin (), Ronny Hansmann () and Uwe T. Zimmermann ()
Additional contact information
Markus Bohlin: KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Ronny Hansmann: Ostfalia – University of Applied Sciences
Uwe T. Zimmermann: Institute of Mathematical Optimization

Chapter Chapter 9 in Handbook of Optimization in the Railway Industry, 2018, pp 181-212 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Railway freight shunting is the process of forming departing trains from arriving freight trains. The process is continuously performed at rail yards. The shunting procedure is complex and rail yards constitute bottlenecks in the rail freight network, often causing delays to individual shipments. One of the problems is that planning for the allocation of tracks at rail yards is difficult, given that the planner has limited resources (tracks, shunting engines, etc.) and needs to foresee the consequences of committed actions for the current inbound trains. The required schedules highly depend on the particular infrastructure of the rail yard, on the configuration of inbound and outbound trains, and on the business objectives. Thus, new optimization tools as active decision support for the dispatchers are closely tailored to the actual processes. Due to its practical relevance, a broad range of variants has been discussed and solved by the scientific community in recent years. For selected relevant variants, we describe their fruitful relation to scientific research topics such as graph coloring, sequence partitioning, and scheduling, we discuss their computational complexity and approximability, and we outline efficient optimization procedures. In particular, we consider a set of models and algorithms which are applicable in practice, and discuss their application to the shunting yards in Ludwigshafen, Germany and in Hallsberg, Sweden. We also discuss similarities and differences between the different approaches and outline the need for future research.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:spr:isochp:978-3-319-72153-8_9

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783319721538

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-72153-8_9

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in International Series in Operations Research & Management Science from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().