Author(s)

R. Guo, J. Guo, G. Xie

Abstract

A railroad yard is the basic production unit of rail freight transportation, located at the junction of railway lines, mainly responding to the operations of arriving, sorting, assembling, marshaling, departing; its operation efficiency directly affects the economic benefits of the railroad industry. However, the problem of railroad yards’ operations planning not only has a complex model and intractable algorithm, but also a lot of uncertainty factors exist. So searching for an efficient, effective, accurate planning method has always been a difficulty in this field. Different countries, different regions and different production environments vary their description methods, in addition to optimization objectives and constraint conditions. Because of this, it becomes very difficult for researchers from related fields to learn from each other, and the experimental results cannot be compared. So there is an urgent need for building a method of unified modeling based on theory. We consider the fact that operation planning problems of a railroad yard are related to particular production scheduling problems. Then, we use production scheduling theory to describe the rail yard’s problem, which can strengthen the theoretical depth and facilitate the research of experts on related fields of scheduling, math, computer and control theory. Combined with the operation feature and overseas and domestic research status, this paper has unified the description method of the operation procedure, variable naming, problem description, objective function and constraint condition. A standard construction method of one switch engine, one hump model was given.

Keywords

railroad yards, operations plan, production scheduling, optimal model