Hump Yard Track Allocation with Temporary Car Storage

Abstract

In rail freight operation, freight cars need to be separated and reformed into new trains at hump yards. The classification procedure is complex and time consuming, and hump yards often constitute bottlenecks in the rail freight network. One of the problems is that planning for the allocation of tracks at hump yards is difficult, given that the planner has limited resources (tracks, shunting engines, etc.) and needs to foresee the future capacity requirements when planning for the current inbound trains. In this paper, we consider the problem of allocating classification tracks in a rail freight hump yard for arriving and departing trains. Arrival and departure times are predetermined and may originate in timetables or estimated arrival and departure times (in case of disturbances in the rail system). The core problem can be formulated as a special list coloring problem. We focus on an extension where individual cars can temporarily be stored on a special subset of the tracks. We model the problem using mixed integer programming, and also propose several heuristics that can quickly give feasible track allocations. As a case study, we consider a real-world problem instance from the Hallsberg Rangerbangård hump yard in Sweden. Planning over horizons over two to four days, we obtain feasible solutions from both the exact and heuristic approaches that allow all outgoing trains to leave on time.This work was supported by Trafikverket under FUD grant F 09-11546/AL50 and by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) under grant 200021-125033/1.RanPla