Optimized load planning of trains in intermodal transportation

Abstract

In this paper the problem of load planning for trains in intermodal container terminals is studied. The objective is to assign load units to wagons of a train such that the utilization of the train is maximized, and setup and transportation costs in the terminal are minimized. Contrary to previous approaches additionally weight restrictions for the wagons are integrated into our model. We present three different integer linear programming formulations and test them on some real-world instances. It is shown that even non-commercial MIP-solvers can solve our models to optimality in reasonable time.