An Industrial Engineering Approach to Improve Railway Planning: A case study

摘要

Railway planning is a continuous and very complex planning process in which many planners are involved. The process of plan creation can be characterized by long throughput times, strict division of tasks, a high task complexity, and a lack of standardization. The resulting plans need to be robust and satisfy all kinds of safety regulations. Literature has given attention to shunting task planning, but often the proposed solution approaches have not been implemented in planning systems. We investigate reasons for the lack of applicability of such solution approaches. Next, we examine the process of creating plans for shunting operations at stations during the night in a case study. Several planners are involved in this process. Both the efficiency and effectiveness of this process had to be improved. We apply an industrial engineering approach to improve this process. This approach consists of a process analysis, a task analysis, an investigation of improvement possibilities, and finally the development of computerized tools for improving parts of planning tasks. The result is an improved system for supporting the planning process. We will discuss characteristics of this support system and the implemented algorithms.