Solving railway routing and scheduling problems in an intermodal freight transportation system.

摘要

The railway line haul is the terminal-to-terminal segment of a door-to-door intermodal transportation system. This research concentrates on the routing and scheduling of the railway line haul. Routing and scheduling is the most important portions of the planning activities performed by railway companies. In this research, we developed an integer programming model to determine optimal operations in minimizing the most significant cost figures involved in such operations. Although the intermodal transportation system combines several transportation modes, our model concentrates on rail segment operations because improving the on-time performance of the rail segment can increase the timeliness of the entire intermodal route. Given container demands differentiated by origin, destination, arrival date at origin, and due date, the objective is to determine a train schedule and container routing scheme to minimize operational costs while meeting on-time delivery requirements of the shipments. The model was extensively tested by example problems of practical backgrounds, derived from those available in literature.