Rail transportation planning in the chemical industry

Rail transports of raw and intermediate materials are cornerstones in chemical logistics. In this paper a multi-commodity rail inventory transportation planning problem for chemicals is proposed. The aim is to generate transportation plans for chemicals and rail cars such that product demands are fulfilled and total logistics cost is minimized. To solve the problem, heuristics based on a rolling-horizon decomposition are proposed. A case study illustrates the applicability of the heuristics. The results show that near-optimal solutions can be generated quickly by the heuristics. Thus, an instrument is offered to transport managers which helps them to optimize chemical logistics processes.