Integrated service network design for rail freight transportation Zhu, Endong ; Crainic, Teodor Gabriel ; Gendreau, Michel
Publication details: Montreal Interuniversity Research Centre on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation, CIRRELT. CIRRELT-2009-45, 2009Description: 34 sSubject(s): Online resources: Abstract: The research aims to provide a good operating plan at a tactical level for freight rail transportation. The service network design problem is studied, as we consider the scheduled service selection, blocking policy, train make-up policy and car distribution together. A 2-layer time-space network is proposed to model the car flow as well as the decisions on both blocks and services. The mixed-integer programming model is difficult and a tabu search heuristic is developed to provide good feasible solutions within reasonable solving effort. Numerical results show the proposed method is robust, and capable to provide near-optimal solutions for rather large instances.The research aims to provide a good operating plan at a tactical level for freight rail transportation. The service network design problem is studied, as we consider the scheduled service selection, blocking policy, train make-up policy and car distribution together. A 2-layer time-space network is proposed to model the car flow as well as the decisions on both blocks and services. The mixed-integer programming model is difficult and a tabu search heuristic is developed to provide good feasible solutions within reasonable solving effort. Numerical results show the proposed method is robust, and capable to provide near-optimal solutions for rather large instances.