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Shunting operations at flat yards: retrieving freight railcars from storage tracks

Author

Listed:
  • Florian Jaehn

    (Helmut Schmidt University – University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg)

  • Alena Otto

    (University of Siegen)

  • Kilian Seifried

    (University of Mannheim)

Abstract

In this paper, we study the railcar retrieval problem (RRT) in which specified numbers of certain types of railcars must be withdrawn from the storage tracks of a flat yard. This task arises as part of daily operations of railcar maintenance workshops. The objective is to minimize the total cost of the shunting operations. We describe the RRT formally, present a mixed-integer program formulation and prove the general case to be NP-hard. For some special cases, exact algorithms with polynomial runtimes are proposed. We also analyze several intuitive heuristic solution approaches motivated by current real-world planning routines. We evaluate their average performances in simulations with different scenarios and provide their worst-case performance guarantee. We show that although the analyzed heuristics result in much better solutions than the naïve planning approach, on average, they are still 30–50% from the optimal objective value and may result in costs up to 14 times higher in the worst case. Therefore, we conclude that optimization should be implemented in practice to save valuable resources. Furthermore, we analyze the impacts of yard layout and the widespread organizational routines on retrieval costs in detailed computational experiments.

Suggested Citation

  • Florian Jaehn & Alena Otto & Kilian Seifried, 2018. "Shunting operations at flat yards: retrieving freight railcars from storage tracks," OR Spectrum: Quantitative Approaches in Management, Springer;Gesellschaft für Operations Research e.V., vol. 40(2), pages 367-393, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:orspec:v:40:y:2018:i:2:d:10.1007_s00291-017-0495-x
    DOI: 10.1007/s00291-017-0495-x
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Ulrich Blasum & Michael R. Bussieck & Winfried Hochstättler & Christoph Moll & Hans-Helmut Scheel & Thomas Winter, 1999. "Scheduling trams in the morning," Mathematical Methods of Operations Research, Springer;Gesellschaft für Operations Research (GOR);Nederlands Genootschap voor Besliskunde (NGB), vol. 49(1), pages 137-148, March.
    2. Boysen, Nils & Fliedner, Malte & Jaehn, Florian & Pesch, Erwin, 2012. "Shunting yard operations: Theoretical aspects and applications," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 220(1), pages 1-14.
    3. Corsi, Thomas M. & Casavant, Ken & Graciano, Tim A., 2012. "A Preliminary Investigation of Private Railcars in North America," Journal of the Transportation Research Forum, Transportation Research Forum, vol. 51(1).
    4. G Budai & D Huisman & R Dekker, 2006. "Scheduling preventive railway maintenance activities," Journal of the Operational Research Society, Palgrave Macmillan;The OR Society, vol. 57(9), pages 1035-1044, September.
    5. Thomas Winter & Uwe Zimmermann, 2000. "Real-time dispatch of trams in storage yards," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 96(1), pages 287-315, November.
    6. Hall, Randolph W., 2000. "Scheduling and facility design for transit railcar maintenance," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 34(2), pages 67-84, February.
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    Cited by:

    1. Nils Boysen & Dirk Briskorn & Sigrid Knust, 2018. "Rail terminal operations," OR Spectrum: Quantitative Approaches in Management, Springer;Gesellschaft für Operations Research e.V., vol. 40(2), pages 317-318, March.
    2. Chuijiang Guo & Shengdong Li, 2022. "Optimizing operation of delivering and fetching wagons at a railway station with mixed-shaped goods operation sites," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 17(1), pages 1-18, January.

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