Operational planning of international freight trains considering the dynamic demands and capacities of border ports

Abstract

This paper presents a solution to address congestion at border ports that may cause significant delays and affect shipment delivery time for the China Railway Express trains. The proposed bi-objective 0–1 integer linear programming model takes into account the capacities of border ports and dynamic freight transportation demands at the network level over large time scales. A heuristic approach based on the Advanced NSGA-II (HANSGA-II) is proposed. Intensive numerical experiments using real network data were conducted to verify the proposed model and algorithm. Additionally, the sensitivity analysis proves that the proposed HANSGA-II is found to outperform the CPLEX solver in terms of solution quality, solution diversity and computational time, and can adapt to the expansion of future rail networks and the growth of demands. With the development of the consolidation mode, some cost parameters in the model can be adjusted to obtain more suitable solutions.