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Scheduled Service Network Design for Freight Rail Transportation

Author

Listed:
  • Endong Zhu

    (App Annie, Beijing, China 100027)

  • Teodor Gabriel Crainic

    (Interuniversity Research Centre on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation and Département de management et technologie, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montréal, Quebec H3C 3P8, Canada)

  • Michel Gendreau

    (Interuniversity Research Centre on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation and Département de mathématiques et de génie industriel, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Montréal, Quebec H3C 3A7, Canada)

Abstract

This paper addresses the scheduled service network design problem for freight rail transportation. The proposed model integrates service selection and scheduling, car classification and blocking, train makeup, and routing of time-dependent customer shipments based on a cyclic three-layer space--time network representation of the associated operations and decisions and their relations and time dimensions. This paper also proposes a matheuristic solution methodology integrating slope scaling, a dynamic block-generation mechanism, long-term-memory-based perturbation strategies, and ellipsoidal search, a new intensification mechanism to thoroughly explore very large neighborhoods of elite solutions restricted using information from the history of the search. Experimental results show that the proposed solution method is efficient and robust, yielding high-quality solutions for realistically sized problem instances.

Suggested Citation

  • 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.
    • Handle: RePEc:inm:oropre:v:62:y:2014:i:2:p:383-400
    DOI: 10.1287/opre.2013.1254
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    References listed on IDEAS

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