Order acceptance for motorail transportation with uncertain parameters

Abstract

Motorail transportation covers the loading of various types of cars and motorcycles onto trains. Order acceptance decisions are mainly driven by the availability of free capacity and have to respect several technical conditions. We focus on a dynamic situation where capacity demand is not known exactly but within certain bounds at the decision point. On the basis of proactive optimization, capacity bottlenecks are identified in advance. In particular, we develop a decision support system with mixed-integer programming to dynamically anticipate maximal available capacity. This key figure serves as an indicator to evaluate the underlying uncertainty and so achieve optimal train utilization. Numerical evaluations show that a variety of instances can be solved by standard commercial optimization software within reasonable time.