Abstract
Heavy-haul railway transport is a critical mode of regional bulk cargo transport. It dramatically improves the freight transport capacity of railway lines by combining several unit trains into one combined train. In order to improve the efficiency of the heavy-haul transport system and reduce the transportation cost, a critical problem involves arranging the combination scheme in the combination station (CBS) and scheduling the train timetable along the trains’ journey. With this consideration, this paper establishes two integer programming models in stages involving the train service plan problem (TSPP) model and train timetabling problem (TTP) model. The TSPP model aims to obtain a train service plan according to the freight demands by minimizing the operation cost. Based on the train service plan, the TTP model is to simultaneously schedule the combination scheme and train timetable, considering the utilization optimal for the CBS. Then, an effective hybrid genetic algorithm (HGA) is designed to solve the model and obtain the combination scheme and train timetable. Finally, some experiments are implemented to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed approaches and demonstrate the effectiveness of the HGA.
Highlights
The timetabling problem (TTP) will be further solved based on this solution
In order to verify the effectiveness of the algorithm, we introduce an unimproved genetic algorithm (GA) and a tabu search (TS) to solve the optimization problem
Based on the actual demand of the heavy-haul railway, this paper proposes a schedulBased on the actual demand of the heavy-haul railway, this paper proposes a scheding approach to optimize the heavy-haul railway transportation plan, including the comuling approach to optimize the heavy-haul railway transportation plan, including the bination scheme and train timetable
Summary
Heavy-haul railways have been the backbone of the coal transportation system because of their high capacity [1] and high efficiency for a long time. A complete heavy-haul railway transportation plan consists of several sub-plans It includes the train service plan, train combination scheme, train timetable, locomotive circulation scheme, empty train return scheme, decomposition scheme, etc. Six main stages in the decision-making process of the heavy-haul railway transportation plan are listed below. It starts by collecting the loading capacity of each loading station and the requests for each unloading station’s demand. Heavy-haul railway operators need to generate executable combination schemes and train timetables based on the collected information according to the actual situation of the heavy-haul railway. The decision-making process at these stages needs to comprehensively consider all kinds of information of the heavy-haul railway transportation system and reflect it into the transportation plan
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