An allocation-scheduling heuristic to manage train traffic in an intermodal terminal

Intermodal terminals are responsible for assigning routes to freight trains entering and leaving the facility, for establishing priority rules when there exist potential conflicts between trains, and for re-planning operations in the event of an incidence. Seeking to automate this process and to increase the efficiency and capacity of the system, we propose here a heuristic method to assign destination points inside the terminal to the inbound trains and to schedule the movements of inbound and outbound trains so that the delays derived from conflicts are minimized. This procedure, combined with navigation and ground hardware, has been implemented in the Seville port in Spain, and is successfully tested here for a series of congested scenarios.