Capacity Planning in the Railroad Industry

MC02.1 Locomotive Resource Planning Using a Non-Linear Programming Approach for Network Simulation

• John Trever; A&L Associates, Inc., 101 Rogers St., Ste. 403, Cambridge, MA; jtrever@ibm.net
• Andreas Aeppli; A&L Associates, Inc., 101 Rogers St., Ste. 403, Cambridge, MA;
• Carl D. Martland; MIT, Dept. of Civil & Environ. Eng., Cambridge, MA 02139; martlan@mitvma.mit.edu
• Jason Kuehn; Multimodal Applied Systems, Inc., 125 Village Blvd., Ste. 270, Princeton, NJ 08540;
• John R. Fallis; Canadian Pacific Railway, 401 - 9th Ave. SW, Calgary, Alberta, T2P 4Z4 , Canada;

Working for a major Canadian railroad, we developed an approach for determining the number of locomotives that would be required under different operating schedules in a planned operating environment. The model generates key network results, i.e., locomotive utilization by class of power, light moves and expected train delay. Various parameters in the model can be adjusted...

MC02.2 Coal Movement by Railroads

• Gilles Reinhardt; University of Alberta, Fac. of Bus., Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2R6 , Canada; gilles.reinhardt@ualberta.ca

This is the largest activity conducted by US railroads. We model the Orin Line, an area producing 1/3 of domestic coal. We tackle current congestion problems on 2 levels: analytically for issues of capacity, pricing and cost allocation; and with discrete simulation for dispatching and variability management.

MC02.3 Locomotive Assignment Using a Branch-First, Cut-Second Approach

• Koorush Ziarati; GERAD, Ecole Polytech., 3000 ch. Cote-Ste-Catherine, Montreal, Quebec, H3T 2A7 , Canada;
• Francois Soumis; GERAD, Ecole Polytech., 3000 ch. Cote-Ste-Catherine, Montreal, Quebec, H3T 2A7 , Canada;
• Jacques Desrosiers; GERAD, Ecole des HEC, 3000 ch. Cote-Ste-Catherine, Montreal, Quebec, H3T 2A7 , Canada;
• Marius M. Solomon; Northeastern University, 314 Hayden Hall, Boston, MA 02186;

We propose a B&C approach for assigning locomotives to trains. The branching decisions define facets of a restricted constraint set polyhedron. The approach improved the best known solution for an almost 2000-leg weekly problem faced by Canadian National, generating potential savings of more than $30,000,000 per year.