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A Freight Service Design Problem for a Railway Corridor

Author

Listed:
  • Alberto Caprara

    (Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informatica e Sistemistica, University of Bologna, 40136 Bologna, Italy)

  • Enrico Malaguti

    (Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informatica e Sistemistica, University of Bologna, 40136 Bologna, Italy)

  • Paolo Toth

    (Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informatica e Sistemistica, University of Bologna, 40136 Bologna, Italy)

Abstract

We study the problem of designing a set of highly profitable freight routes in a railway corridor, taking into account the level of service requested by different goods; in particular, the profit achieved by transporting a good is a nonlinear function of the associated travel time. We propose an ILP model that is solved heuristically by column generation and fixing techniques. Computational results on a real corridor crossing 11 European countries are reported, showing that we can find solutions that are provably close to optimal. Given the large size of our instances, a key issue of our approach is to avoid finding an optimal solution of the continuous relaxation of our model, stopping as soon as near-optimal primal and dual solutions are available.

Suggested Citation

  • Alberto Caprara & Enrico Malaguti & Paolo Toth, 2011. "A Freight Service Design Problem for a Railway Corridor," Transportation Science, INFORMS, vol. 45(2), pages 147-162, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:inm:ortrsc:v:45:y:2011:i:2:p:147-162
    DOI: 10.1287/trsc.1100.0348
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Jean-François Cordeau & Paolo Toth & Daniele Vigo, 1998. "A Survey of Optimization Models for Train Routing and Scheduling," Transportation Science, INFORMS, vol. 32(4), pages 380-404, November.
    2. Crainic, Teodor Gabriel & Laporte, Gilbert, 1997. "Planning models for freight transportation," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 97(3), pages 409-438, March.
    3. Kaj Holmberg & Johan Hellstrand, 1998. "Solving the Uncapacitated Network Design Problem by a Lagrangean Heuristic and Branch-and-Bound," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 46(2), pages 247-259, April.
    4. Alberto Ceselli & Michael Gatto & Marco E. Lübbecke & Marc Nunkesser & Heiko Schilling, 2008. "Optimizing the Cargo Express Service of Swiss Federal Railways," Transportation Science, INFORMS, vol. 42(4), pages 450-465, November.
    5. Cynthia Barnhart & Ellis L. Johnson & George L. Nemhauser & Martin W. P. Savelsbergh & Pamela H. Vance, 1998. "Branch-and-Price: Column Generation for Solving Huge Integer Programs," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 46(3), pages 316-329, June.
    6. Crainic, Teodor Gabriel, 2000. "Service network design in freight transportation," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 122(2), pages 272-288, April.
    7. J Andersen & M Christiansen, 2009. "Designing new European rail freight services," Journal of the Operational Research Society, Palgrave Macmillan;The OR Society, vol. 60(3), pages 348-360, March.
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    Cited by:

    1. Alberto Caprara & Fabio Furini & Enrico Malaguti, 2013. "Uncommon Dantzig-Wolfe Reformulation for the Temporal Knapsack Problem," INFORMS Journal on Computing, INFORMS, vol. 25(3), pages 560-571, August.
    2. Line Blander Reinhardt & David Pisinger & Richard Lusby, 2018. "Railway capacity and expansion analysis using time discretized paths," Flexible Services and Manufacturing Journal, Springer, vol. 30(4), pages 712-739, December.
    3. Timo Gschwind & Stefan Irnich, 2017. "Stabilized column generation for the temporal knapsack problem using dual-optimal inequalities," OR Spectrum: Quantitative Approaches in Management, Springer;Gesellschaft für Operations Research e.V., vol. 39(2), pages 541-556, March.
    4. Zhimei Wang & Avishai Ceder, 2017. "Efficient design of freight train operation with double-hump yards," Journal of the Operational Research Society, Palgrave Macmillan;The OR Society, vol. 68(12), pages 1600-1619, December.
    5. Timo Gschwind & Stefan Irnich, 2014. "Stabilized Column Generation for the Temporal Knapsack Problem using Dual- Optimal Inequalities," Working Papers 1413, Gutenberg School of Management and Economics, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, revised 13 Nov 2014.

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