An Optimization Method for the Train Service Network Design Problem

Effective railway freight transportation relies on a well-designed train service network. This paper investigates the train service network design problem at the tactical level for the Chinese railway system. It aims to determine the types of train services to be offered, how many trains of each service are to be dispatched per day (service frequency), and by which train services shipments are to be transported. An integer programming model is proposed to address this problem. The optimization model considers both through train services between nonadjacent yards, and two classes of service between two adjacent yards ( i.e., shuttle train services directly from one yard to its adjacent yard, and local train services that make at least one intermediate stop). The objective of the model is to optimize the transportation of all the shipments with minimal costs. The costs consist of accumulation costs, classification coststrain operation costs, and train travel costs. The NP-hard nature of the problem prevents an exact solution algorithm from finding the optimal solution within a reasonable time, even for small-scale cases. Therefore, an improved genetic algorithm is designed and employed here. To demonstrate the proposed model and the algorithm, a case study on a real-world sub-network in China is carried out. The computational results show that the proposed approach can obtain high-quality solutions with satisfactory speed. Moreover, comparative analysis on a case that assumes all the shuttle train services between any two adjacent yards to be provided without optimization reveals some interesting insights.