TY - RPRT
T1 - A Matheuristic Approach for Solving the Railroad Hump Yard Block-to-Track Assignment
AU - Haahr, Jørgen Thorlund
AU - Lusby, Richard Martin
PY - 2015
Y1 - 2015
N2 - This paper presents a novel matheuristic for solving
the Hump Yard Block-to-Track Assignment Problem.
This is an important problem rising in the railway
freight industry and involves scheduling the transitions
of a set of rail cars from a set of inbound trains
to a set of outbound trains over a certain planning
horizon. It was also the topic of the 2014 challenge
organised by the Railway Applications Section of the
Institute for Operations Research and the Management
Sciences for which the proposed matheuristic
was awarded first prize. Our approach decomposes
the problem into three highly dependent subproblems.
Optimization-based strategies are adopted for
two of these, while the third is solved using a greedy
heuristic. We demonstrate the efficiency of the complete
framework on the official datasets, where solutions
within 4-14% of a known lower bound (to a
relaxed problem) are found. We further show that
improvements of around 8% can be achieved if outbound
trains are allowed to be delayed by up to two
hours in the hope of ensuring an earlier connection
for some of the rail cars.
AB - This paper presents a novel matheuristic for solving
the Hump Yard Block-to-Track Assignment Problem.
This is an important problem rising in the railway
freight industry and involves scheduling the transitions
of a set of rail cars from a set of inbound trains
to a set of outbound trains over a certain planning
horizon. It was also the topic of the 2014 challenge
organised by the Railway Applications Section of the
Institute for Operations Research and the Management
Sciences for which the proposed matheuristic
was awarded first prize. Our approach decomposes
the problem into three highly dependent subproblems.
Optimization-based strategies are adopted for
two of these, while the third is solved using a greedy
heuristic. We demonstrate the efficiency of the complete
framework on the official datasets, where solutions
within 4-14% of a known lower bound (to a
relaxed problem) are found. We further show that
improvements of around 8% can be achieved if outbound
trains are allowed to be delayed by up to two
hours in the hope of ensuring an earlier connection
for some of the rail cars.
KW - Freight Train Optimization
KW - Hump Yard Optimization
KW - Block To Track Assignment
KW - Matheuristic
M3 - Report
BT - A Matheuristic Approach for Solving the Railroad Hump Yard Block-to-Track Assignment
PB - DTU Management Engineering
ER -