IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/transa/v31y1997i4p335-348.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Planning Australian freight rail operations: An overview

Author

Listed:
  • Ferreira, L.

Abstract

After a brief outline of freight rail operations planning, the paper reviews the research and development of optimization and simulation tools to undertake train planning, train and locomotive scheduling, as well as track maintenance planning. Although optimum solutions can be obtained using such tools, they have not been widely embraced by rail organizations. The simplifying assumptions made by most models make their practical application difficult to achieve. Whilst drawing on overseas research, the paper focuses mainly on the Australian experience for operations planning practice. Freight rail market share increases are closely related to the level of service offered, particularly in transit times and reliability of arrivals. Both these two levels of service attributes are associated with track infrastructure design and maintenance standards. The paper summarizes some of the requirements for track maintenance planning, and describes a model designed to optimize the location of sidings on a single track corridor. Considerable research has been devoted to the development of operations research applications for individual planning and control tasks. However, the use of such techniques to optimize an entire rail operation, subject to resource and customer service constraints, has not been attempted. This is mainly due to the complexity of the overall task, and the degree to which practical issues prevent optimal solutions from being implemented. The use of simulation and expert systems approaches would seem to offer a useful practical path in operations planning.

Suggested Citation

  • Ferreira, L., 1997. "Planning Australian freight rail operations: An overview," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 31(4), pages 335-348, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:transa:v:31:y:1997:i:4:p:335-348
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0965-8564(96)00026-2
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Martland, Carl D., 1992. "Rail freight service productivity from the manager's perspective," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 26(6), pages 457-469, November.
    2. Oecd, 1995. "International Infrastructure Competition," OECD Digital Economy Papers 10, OECD Publishing.
    3. Mark A. Turnquist & Mark S. Daskin, 1982. "Queuing Models of Classification and Connection Delay in Railyards," Transportation Science, INFORMS, vol. 16(2), pages 207-230, May.
    4. Haghani, Ali E., 1989. "Formulation and solution of a combined train routing and makeup, and empty car distribution model," Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Elsevier, vol. 23(6), pages 433-452, December.
    5. Crainic, Teodor G. & Rousseau, Jean-Marc, 1986. "Multicommodity, multimode freight transportation: A general modeling and algorithmic framework for the service network design problem," Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Elsevier, vol. 20(3), pages 225-242, June.
    6. Kraft, Edwin R., 1982. "Jam Capacity of single track rail lines," 23rd Annual Transportation Research Forum, New Orleans, Louisiana, October 28-30, 1982 311540, Transportation Research Forum.
    7. Dejan Jovanović & Patrick T. Harker, 1991. "Tactical Scheduling of Rail Operations: The SCAN I System," Transportation Science, INFORMS, vol. 25(1), pages 46-64, February.
    8. Teodor Gabriel Crainic & Michael Florian & José-Eugenio Léal, 1990. "A Model for the Strategic Planning of National Freight Transportation by Rail," Transportation Science, INFORMS, vol. 24(1), pages 1-24, February.
    9. Teodor Crainic & Jacques-A. Ferland & Jean-Marc Rousseau, 1984. "A Tactical Planning Model for Rail Freight Transportation," Transportation Science, INFORMS, vol. 18(2), pages 165-184, May.
    10. Bintong Chen & Patrick T. Harker, 1990. "Two Moments Estimation of the Delay on Single-Track Rail Lines with Scheduled Traffic," Transportation Science, INFORMS, vol. 24(4), pages 261-275, November.
    11. Mark H. Keaton, 1992. "Designing Railroad Operating Plans: A Dual Adjustment Method for Implementing Lagrangian Relaxation," Transportation Science, INFORMS, vol. 26(4), pages 263-279, November.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Nils Boysen & Malte Fliedner & Florian Jaehn & Erwin Pesch, 2013. "A Survey on Container Processing in Railway Yards," Transportation Science, INFORMS, vol. 47(3), pages 312-329, August.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Crainic, Teodor Gabriel & Laporte, Gilbert, 1997. "Planning models for freight transportation," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 97(3), pages 409-438, March.
    2. Lin, Bo-Liang & Wang, Zhi-Mei & Ji, Li-Jun & Tian, Ya-Ming & Zhou, Guo-Qing, 2012. "Optimizing the freight train connection service network of a large-scale rail system," Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Elsevier, vol. 46(5), pages 649-667.
    3. Ruf, Moritz & Cordeau, Jean-François, 2021. "Adaptive large neighborhood search for integrated planning in railroad classification yards," Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Elsevier, vol. 150(C), pages 26-51.
    4. Xin Wang & Teodor Gabriel Crainic & Stein W. Wallace, 2019. "Stochastic Network Design for Planning Scheduled Transportation Services: The Value of Deterministic Solutions," INFORMS Journal on Computing, INFORMS, vol. 31(1), pages 153-170, February.
    5. Zhimei Wang & Avishai Ceder, 2017. "Efficient design of freight train operation with double-hump yards," Journal of the Operational Research Society, Palgrave Macmillan;The OR Society, vol. 68(12), pages 1600-1619, December.
    6. Jeong, Seung-Ju & Lee, Chi-Guhn & Bookbinder, James H., 2007. "The European freight railway system as a hub-and-spoke network," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 41(6), pages 523-536, July.
    7. Alena Otto & Erwin Pesch, 2019. "The train-to-yard assignment problem," OR Spectrum: Quantitative Approaches in Management, Springer;Gesellschaft für Operations Research e.V., vol. 41(2), pages 549-580, June.
    8. Endong Zhu & Teodor Gabriel Crainic & Michel Gendreau, 2014. "Scheduled Service Network Design for Freight Rail Transportation," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 62(2), pages 383-400, April.
    9. Arnt-Gunnar Lium & Teodor Gabriel Crainic & Stein W. Wallace, 2009. "A Study of Demand Stochasticity in Service Network Design," Transportation Science, INFORMS, vol. 43(2), pages 144-157, May.
    10. Alena Otto & Erwin Pesch, 2017. "Operation of shunting yards: train-to-yard assignment problem," Journal of Business Economics, Springer, vol. 87(4), pages 465-486, May.
    11. Kraay, David R. & Harker, Patrick T., 1995. "Real-time scheduling of freight railroads," Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Elsevier, vol. 29(3), pages 213-229, June.
    12. Jean-François Cordeau & Paolo Toth & Daniele Vigo, 1998. "A Survey of Optimization Models for Train Routing and Scheduling," Transportation Science, INFORMS, vol. 32(4), pages 380-404, November.
    13. Boysen, Nils & Fliedner, Malte & Jaehn, Florian & Pesch, Erwin, 2012. "Shunting yard operations: Theoretical aspects and applications," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 220(1), pages 1-14.
    14. Jin, Jian Gang & Zhao, Jun & Lee, Der-Horng, 2013. "A column generation based approach for the Train Network Design Optimization problem," Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, Elsevier, vol. 50(C), pages 1-17.
    15. Crainic, Teodor Gabriel, 2000. "Service network design in freight transportation," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 122(2), pages 272-288, April.
    16. Armin Fügenschuh & Henning Homfeld & Hanno Schülldorf, 2015. "Single-Car Routing in Rail Freight Transport," Transportation Science, INFORMS, vol. 49(1), pages 130-148, February.
    17. Chen, Chongshuang & Dollevoet, Twan & Zhao, Jun, 2018. "One-block train formation in large-scale railway networks: An exact model and a tree-based decomposition algorithm," Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Elsevier, vol. 118(C), pages 1-30.
    18. Chen, C. & Dollevoet, T.A.B. & Zhao, J., 2017. "One-block train formation in large-scale railway networks: An exact model and a tree-based decomposition algorithm," Econometric Institute Research Papers EI-2017-32, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Erasmus School of Economics (ESE), Econometric Institute.
    19. Boliang Lin & Jingsong Duan & Jiaxi Wang & Min Sun & Wengao Peng & Chang Liu & Jie Xiao & Siqi Liu & Jianping Wu, 2018. "A study of the car-to-train assignment problem for rail express cargos in the scheduled and unscheduled train services network," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 13(10), pages 1-18, October.
    20. Dall'Orto, Leonardo Campo & Crainic, Teodor Gabriel & Leal, Jose Eugenio & Powell, Warren B., 2006. "The single-node dynamic service scheduling and dispatching problem," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 170(1), pages 1-23, April.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:transa:v:31:y:1997:i:4:p:335-348. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/547/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.