Constructing a model for the automated operative planning of local operations at railroad technical stations

Abstract

This paper has investigated the technology of forwarding local wagons at railroad technical stations and established the need to improve it given the extra downtime of local wagons. The main issue relates to the considerable combinatorial complexity of the tasks of operational planning. Another problem is that as part of the conventional approach, planning a station operation and planning a local operation at it is considered separately. Another planning issue is the lack of high-quality models for the preparation of initial data, in particular, data on the duration of technological operations, such as, for example, shunting operations involving local wagons forwarding. To resolve these issues, a new approach has been proposed, under which the tasks of operative planning of a technical station’s operation and its subsystem of local operations are tackled simultaneously, based on a single model. To this end, a mathematical model of vector combinatoric optimization has been built, which uses the criteria of total operating costs and wagon-hours spent at a station when forwarding local wagon flows, in the form of separate objective functions. Within this model, a predictive model was constructed in the form of a fuzzy inference system. This model is designed to determine the duration of shunting half-runs when executing the spotting/picking operations for delivering local wagons to enterprises’ goods sheds. The model provides for the accuracy level that would suffice at planning, in contrast to classical methods. A procedure has been devised for optimizing the planning model, which employs the modern genetic algorithm of vector optimization NSGA-III. This procedure is implemented in the form of software that makes it possible to build a rational operative plan for the operation of a technical station, including a subsystem of local operations, in graphic form, thereby reducing the operating costs by 5 % and the duration of maintenance of a local wagon by 8 %. The resulting effect could reduce the turnover time of a freight car in general on the railroad network, speed up the delivery of goods, and reduce the cost of transportation