Chow, AHF; Tan, E; Ng, B; Pavlides, A; Bablinski, K; (2016) Scheduling and routing freight trains with multiple cost functions. In: Proceedings of the 95th Annual MeetingTransportation Research Board. Transportation Research Board: Washington, DC, USA.

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Abstract

This study presents a multi-objective optimization model for effectively scheduling and routing freight trains with minimum disruption caused to surrounding train traffic given the existing infrastructure capacity. Most existing timetabling policies around the world favor passenger train operations over the freight ones. The objective of the study is to facilitate freight operations with the proposed methodology. The optimization model is formulated here as a mixed integer program (MIP) which captures simultaneous scheduling and routing options of trains. The optimizer is applied to a real case scenario on the Brighton Main Line (BML) in southeast England. Given the network configuration, the optimizer is shown to be able to schedule and (re-)route requested freight trains with minimized additional costs induced to the system. The authors also examine selected scenario with marginal cost analysis and find that the train allocation process produced by the optimization model is somehow similar to existing practice in small scale applications, while the proposed algorithm is more systematic, generalizable to large-scale applications and multiple cost functions.

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