Integrated Optimisation Model of Daily Freight Train Scheduling and Dynamic Railcar Routing Based on a Two-Layer Space-Time Network

Abstract

This paper focuses on daily freight train scheduling and dynamic railcar routing problems for rail freight transportation at the operational level.  Two mixed integer linear programming models that adopted different strategies were formulated based on a continuous two-layer time-space network. We simultaneously considered the benefits of railroad company and service quality when setting the objective function. By solving the  models, we can distribute the dynamic railcar flows to the train paths in the basic train timetable to obtain the daily train operation plan over a short time horizon (e.g. a day), which will be helpful for dispatchers to make decisions such as the empty railcar distribution and car routing (trip planning). Finally, we compared two models on a part of the Chinese railroad network. The results show that the second model can effectively improve the efficiency of railroad freight transportation.