How to park freight trains on rail–rail transshipment yards: the train location problem

Abstract

In modern rail-rail transshipment yards huge gantry cranes spanning all railway tracks allow for an ecient transshipment of containers between dierent freight trains. This way, multiple trains loaded with cargo for varying destinations can be consolidated to a reduced number of homogeneous trains, which is an essential requirement of hub-and-spoke railway systems. An important problem during the daily operations of such a transshipment yard is the train location problem, which assigns each train of a given pulse to a railway track (vertical position) and decides on each train's parking position on the track (horizontal position), so that the distances of container movements are minimized and the overall workload is equally shared among cranes.For this problem a mathematical model is presented, dierent heuristic solution procedures are described and tested in a comprehensive computational study. The results show that our procedures allow for a remarkable reduction of train processing time compared to typical real-world train location policies.

New bounds and algorithms for the transshipment yard scheduling problem

“…Here, each crane is assigned a specific yard area, which is exclusively processed by the respective crane, so that the workload is equally shared among cranes. Problem (iv), the assignment of trains to tracks (parking of trains), can be solved as a quadratic assignment problem, which is shown by Alicke and Arnold (1998) and Kellner et al (2010). Finally, Alicke (2002) provides a scheduling procedure, which sequences the moves of gantry cranes (problem (v)).…”

An integrated model for the transshipment yard scheduling problem

“…The problem is shown to be NP-hard in the strong sense and the authors present different heuristics and exact solution procedures. Kellner et al (2012) present a solution procedure that can be used to solve a decision variant of problem 2, i.e. the parking problem of trains.…”

Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) Performance in Solving the Train Location Problem at Transshipment Yard

“…It is the aim of the TLP to evenly spread the overall workload among the given gantry cranes of the yard, so that by minimizing the maximum workload of cranes train processing of a given pulse is accelerated. This basic decision problem relies on some premises [1].…”

“…This problem had been studies by Michael Kellner, Nils Boysen, Malte Fliedner [1] using efficient heuristic solution procedures to solve it, which they used a myopic heuristic procedure and two meta-heuristics, a simulated annealing approach and a genetic algorithm. And today I am going to solve it by particle swarm optimization (PSO).…”

“…where r 1 and r 2 are the random numbers in the interval [0,1]. c 1 is a positive constant, called as coefficient of the self-recognition component, c 2 is a positive constant, called as coefficient of the social component.…”