Freight train scheduling for industrial lines with multiple railway undertakings

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Abstract

With the liberalisation of the rail freight market, the number of railway undertakings in operation is increasing. Trains run by several railway undertakings (RUs) converge at industrial lines leading up to terminals. Here, uncoordinated interaction between mainline RUs and limited infrastructure capacity leads to bottlenecks, which reduces resource utilisation of railway undertakings. Outsourcing last-mile operations to an independent local railway undertaking can improve capacity utilisation and decrease the time engines of mainline engines spend within the considered network. In this paper, we propose the Industrial Line Scheduling Problem with multiple RU, a resource scheduling model for freight trains at industrial lines. The aim is to minimise unproductive time of mainline engines and the number of deployed local engines. The results show that the potential savings per employed local engine are highly dependent the timetables of inbound and outbound trains within the network, the dwell time of railcars and on the degree of local railway undertaking involvement.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Article number100466
Number of pages17
JournalJournal of Rail Transport Planning & Management
Volume31
Publication statusPublished - 2024
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

Scopus 85201479622
ORCID /0000-0003-4111-2255/work/166325413

Keywords

Keywords

  • Freight rail, Railway undertakings, Industrial railway, Production schedule, Optimisation