Abstract
Railroad blocking problem (RBP) is one of the problems that need an important decision in freight railroads. The objective of solving this problem is to minimize the costs of delivering all commodities by deciding which inter-terminal blocks to build and by specifying the assignment of commodities to these blocks, while observing limits on the number and cumulative volume of the blocks assembled at each terminal. RBP is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem with billions of decision variables. To solve the real-life RBP, developing a metaheuristic algorithm is necessary. In this paper, for the first time, a new genetic algorithm-based solution method, which is a population-based algorithm, is proposed to solve the RBP. To evaluate the efficiency and the quality of solutions of the proposed algorithm, several simulated test problems are used. The quality and computational time of the generated solutions for the test problems with the proposed genetic algorithm are compared with the solutions of the CPLEX software. The results show high efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
Highlights
Railroad blocking problem (RBP) is an important subject for freight railroad companies because its solution can reduce some extra costs
This paper, for the first time, introduced an approach based on genetic algorithm metaheuristic to solve the railroad blocking problem in a short reasonable time and high accuracy
The results show high efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed algorithms
Summary
Railroad blocking problem (RBP) is an important subject for freight railroad companies because its solution can reduce some extra costs. A load on its route may traverse on many classification yards from its origin to its destination. In these places, the arriving load, which is usually composed of different individual shipments, is regrouped to be carried by departing trains. To avoid loads from being regrouped at every classification yard they pass through, it is better to group various shipments together to form a block. A block may contain individual shipments whose origin or destination may or may not be the origin or destination of the whole block. These shipments are regrouped only after reaching the final destination of the block
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