Single Wagonload Production Schemes Improvements Using GüterSim (Agent-based Simulation Tool)

Single Wagonload (SWL) is still a major component of the Swiss freight transportation system. To hold the market share of the SWL system a reduction of production costs and an increasing quality is needed. To evaluate alternative production schemes and the effects of technological innovations a simulation tool is necessary. Since there are no suitable tools available which cover all needs for a SWL simulation, the IVT developed a new agent-based tool called GüterSim on the basis of the existing software MATSim. GüterSim models the routing of the freight wagons, as agents, according to the routes in the real SWL network and the production schemes. It is a scalable model with two network levels and an integrated approach.This paper presents the following achievements: Modeling existing timetables and routing of freight trains; opportunity for improvements of train routings and schedules to optimize the existing productions scheme; integrating the capacity restrictions of the infrastructure to check the realizability of the improvements; automatic timetable generation on the existing network; and automatic generation of new production systems. A case study is presented to prove model's application. The work is based on real data from the SWL Swiss network which includes infrastructure data, schedules, rolling stock and locomotive data. Therefore the conclusions are based on real freight demand within the Swiss freight network. GüterSim is proved as a tool to improve SWL production schemes and scalable to other freight networks with fixed schedules.