Author(s)

P Cenek, P Bednár & L Jánošíková

Abstract

Political changes in Slovakia and neighbouring Central and East European countries caused important changes in cargo flows. Moreover, much more attention is paid to the efficiency of railway operations and to the higher quality of services for customers. These are the reasons why a project of an optimisation of cargo operations for the Slovak Railways was launched in the year 2001, The project was aimed on analysis and optimisation of operations in cargo traffic on three levels: - location of marshalling yards, - choice of cargo trains, - simulation of traffic in a marshalling yard. A model of cargo traffic on the railway network was designed using available input data on network infrastructure, transportation flows and estimated costs. The first two tasks were formulated as location problem and network design problem and suitable methods were implemented for their solution. A simulation model was developed to approach the third problem. The major attention in this paper will be paid to a network design problem and to an implementation of results under real life conditions.

Keywords