How to Park Freight Trains on Rail-Rail Transshipment Yards: The Train Location Problem

Michael Kellner (), Nils Boysen () and Malte Fliedner ()
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Michael Kellner: School of Economics and Business Administration, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena
Nils Boysen: School of Economics and Business Administration, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena
Malte Fliedner: Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Lehrstuhl für Operations Management

No 02/2010, Jena Research Papers in Business and Economics - Working and Discussion Papers (Expired!) from Friedrich Schiller University Jena, School of Economics and Business Administration

Abstract: In modern rail-rail transshipment yards huge gantry cranes spanning all railway tracks allow for an efficent transshipment of containers between different freight trains. This way, multiple trains loaded with cargo for varying destinations can be consolidated to a reduced number of homogeneous trains, which is an essential requirement of hub-and-spoke railway systems. An important problem during the daily operations of such a transshipment yard is the train location problem, which assigns each train of a given pulse to a railway track (vertical position) and decides on each train's parking position on the track (horizontal position), so that the distances of container movements are minimized and the overall workload is equally shared among cranes. For this problem a mathematical model is presented, different heuristic solution procedures are described and tested in a comprehensive computational study. The results show that our procedures allow for a remarkable reduction of train processing time compared to typical real-world train location policies.

Keywords: Railway systems; Transshipment yards; Container handling; Parking positions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-02-03
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Published in: Operations Research Spectrum 34/3 (2012), 535-561.

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jen:jenjbe:2010-02

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