Modeling the Railway Express Shipment Service Network Design Problem

As the air pollution becomes increasingly severe, the express train plays a more important role in shifting road freight and reducing carbon emissions. In this case, the design of railway express shipment service network has become a key issue which needs to be addressed urgently both in theory and practice. The Railway Express Shipment Service Network Design Problem (RESSNDP) is not only involved with the selection of train services and determination of service frequency, but also associated with shipment routing, which can be viewed as a Service Network Design Problem (SNDP) with railway characteristics. This paper proposes a non-linear integer programming model (INLP) which aims at finding a service network and shipment routing plan with minimum cost, while satisfying the transportation time constraints of shipments, carrying capacity constraints of train services, flow conservation constraint and logical constraints among decision variables. In addition, linearization technique is adopted to transform the authors' model into a linear one to obtain a global optimal solution. With the increase of problem scale, it is more and more difficult to solve the authors' model by using commercial softwares, hence, an efficient simulated annealing (SA) based heuristic method is developed. To evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the authors' approach, a small instance is first carried out and a comparison between the solutions obtained by Gurobi 7.5.2 and heuristic method is made. Then, the model and SA approach are applied to a real-world larger sub-network in China.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AR040 Standing Committee on Freight Rail Transportation.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  ,    
• Authors:
  • Liu, Siqi
  • Lin, Boliang
  • Wu, Jianping
  • Zhao, Yinan
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 98th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2019-1-13 to 2019-1-17
• Date: 2019

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 21p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Express service; Railroad transportation; Shipments
• Uncontrolled Terms: Service network design
• Geographic Terms: China
• Subject Areas: Design; Freight Transportation; Operations and Traffic Management; Railroads;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01697301
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 19-04047
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Mar 1 2019 3:50PM