A heuristic for routing and scheduling freight trains in a passenger rail network. Issue 1 (17th January 2007)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Godwin, T.; Gopalan, Ram; Narendran, T.T.
• Is Part Of: International journal of logistics systems and management. Volume 3:Issue 1(2007)
• Page Start: 101
• Page End: 133
• Publication Date: 2007-01-17
• Subjects: rail transportation -- freight trains -- passenger rail networks -- dispatching rules -- routing -- scheduling -- logistics -- India -- railways; Business logistics -- Periodicals; 658.5005
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1742-7967

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of routing and scheduling freight trains in a rail network where passenger trains must adhere to a strict schedule and freight train movements can be inserted at any time or as demands arise, without disrupting passenger trains. An exemplar of such a situation is the Indian Railway System. The problem is formulated as a 0–1 mixed integer programme to minimise the sum of travel times of the freight trains in a passenger rail network, for which a lower bound is developed. We propose a hierarchical permutation heuristic, which identifies the route and schedule for freight trains one at a time in a passenger rail network. A number of dispatching rules are proposed for identifying the best hierarchy in which trains must be scheduled. We report the computational experience for solving various problems based upon real data.