Abstract
This article presents a novel matheuristic for solving the
hump yard block-to-track assignment problem. This is an
important problem arising 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 organized 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 2 h in the hope of
ensuring an earlier connection for some of the rail cars.
© 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Journal | Networks |
Volume | 67 |
Issue number | 2 |
Pages (from-to) | 126–138 |
Number of pages | 13 |
ISSN | 0028-3045 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2016 |