Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
1023455 Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review 2013 17 Pages PDF
Abstract

This paper investigates the Train Network Design Optimization problem arising from railroad industry which involves the integration of three inter-related decision sub-problems: train routing which is to identify origin, destination and itinerary for individual trains; block-to-train assignment detailing the block movements with trains and swaps between trains; and crew-to-train assignment specifying the crew services for train routes. A column generation based hierarchical approach with two stages is designed: the first stage generates a pool of promising train routes iteratively based on the crew segments by the column generation technique; and the second stage develops an integer linear programming model for the subsequent decisions including train route selection and block-to-train assignment. Numerical experiments with realistic test instances are conducted and the outcome demonstrates the capability of the proposed approach in solving the Train Network Design Optimization problem competently.

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