Shunting Minimal Rail Car Allocation

Marco E. Luebbecke (m.luebbecketu-bs.de)
Uwe T. Zimmermann (u.zimmermanntu-bs.de)

Abstract: We consider the rail car management at industrial in-plant railroads. Demands for materials or empty cars are characterized by a track, a car type, and the desired quantity. If available, we assign cars from the stock, possibly substituting types, otherwise we rent additional cars. Transportation requests are fulfilled as a short sequence of pieces of work, the so-called blocks. Their design at a minimal total transportation cost is the planning task considered in this paper. It decomposes into the rough distribution of cars among regions, and the \NP-hard shunting minimal allocation of cars per region. We present integer programming formulations for the two problem levels. Our computational experience from practical data encourages an installation in practice.

Keywords: Mixed integer programming; shunting minimization; decomposition; rail transport

Category 1: Applications -- OR and Management Sciences (Transportation )

Category 2: Integer Programming ((Mixed) Integer Linear Programming )

Citation: Dept. Mathematical Optimization, Braunschweig University of Technology, June 2003

Download: [Postscript][PDF]

Entry Submitted: 06/30/2003
Entry Accepted: 06/30/2003
Entry Last Modified: 06/30/2003

Modify/Update this entry