Scheduled Service Network Design for Freight Rail Transportation
Endong Zhu, Teodor Gabriel Crainic, Michel Gendreau
Operations Research · 2014 · Volume 62 · Issue 2
Abstract
This paper addresses the scheduled service network design problem for freight rail transportation. The proposed model integrates service selection and scheduling, car classification and blocking, train makeup, and routing of time-dependent customer shipments based on a cyclic three-layer space–time network representation of the associated operations and decisions and their relations and time dimensions. This paper also proposes a matheuristic solution methodology integrating slope scaling, a dynamic block-generation mechanism, long-term-memory-based perturbation strategies, and ellipsoidal search, a new intensification mechanism to thoroughly explore very large neighborhoods of elite solutions restricted using information from the history of the search. Experimental results show that the proposed solution method is efficient and robust, yielding high-quality solutions for realistically sized problem instances.
Keywords
scheduled service network design, rail freight transportation, capacitated multicommodity network design, slope scaling, ellipsoidal search
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