Management Science Seminar: Optimization Models for Railway Freight Transportation

Event Date: 27 February 2015

Date : Friday, February 27

Time : 1.30pm  - 2.30 pm

Location - The Blackett room GH 863

Speaker - Tibor Iles

Abstract: Although freight and passenger railway transportation has many common features there is at least one major difference, namely, there is no time table for railway freight transportation in the sense as for passenger railway transportation. For railway freight transportation instead of time tables there are time table of planned freight trains with quite flexible rules of changing those in case of available capacities for railway transportations. Railway freight transportation is based on orders rather than precise time tables. The orders for a freight train could be changed even few hours before the leaving time of a freight train.

The models and methods that are presented in this talk have been developed during a project sponsored by MÁV Trakció Zrt. (part of the MÁV Group). MÁV – The Hungarian State Railway Company gave us lots of data for railway freight transportation. We have got data for orders of freight trains from the planning period and data of those freight trains that were running in the analyzed period, as well. The research questions of the project were the following ones: under uncertain conditions that the possible changes of ordered freight trains might causes develop models for (i) planning the train and duty assignments for a month, (ii) due to the fact that the changes in ordered trains are quite regular develop re-optimization model for train assignment.

In this talk we focus on planning and re-optimization models for train assignment and discuss similarities and differences between these models. Finally, we illustrate our models and methods with some computational results on real-life problem instances.

Published: 26 February 2015