Why Does a Railway Infrastructure Company Need an Optimized Train Path Assignment for Industrialized Timetabling?

Today’s timetabling process of German rail freight transport is a handicraft make-to-order process. Train paths are only planned when operators apply for specific train services including specific train characteristics such as train weight, train length, accelerating and braking power, etc. What seems customer-friendly, has indeed many disadvantages: frequent mismatch of demand and supply, long customer response times and general lack of service level differentiation for the train operators; inefficient use of network capacity and timetabling resources for the rail infrastructure manager. Modern and industrialized supply chain concepts do not feature pure make-to-order processes but often prefer a mix of maketo-stock/make-to-order processes, namely assemble-to-order processes. The paper shows how an assemble-to-order process can eliminate the aforementioned disadvantages of today’s make-to-order process in rail freight timetabling. It then focuses on the assembly phase of the new process and gives a basic introduction to the underlying optimization model. Some test scenarios illustrate the performance of the optimization model.