EURO 2024 Copenhagen
Abstract Submission

EURO-Online login

105. A Hybrid Benders Decomposition for Multi-stop Railway Freight Loading and Unloading Problem

Invited abstract in session MB-56: Freight railway transportation , stream Transportation.

Monday, 10:30-12:00
Room: S04 (building: 101)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Chenhao Zhou
School of Management, Northwestern Polytechnical University
2. Xiaorong Ren
Northwestern Polytechnical University
3. Li Xue
Northwestern Polytechnical University

Abstract

Railway freight transportation plays a crucial role in China's economic growth and has received substantial investment in railway infrastructure. The introduction of the high-speed freight train presents the logistics market with a competitive alternative between air and land transport. This new service enables cargo loading and unloading at various stops along the journey in order to maximize carriage utilization. Given the tight transit time at each stop, the high-speed freight service needs to allocate freights into different carriages without any remarshalling — such as removing existing freights before putting everything back — between freights. As such, the freights must be handled in a First-In-Last-Out (FILO) order and requires a careful plan of carriage assignment and storage allocation for each freight, which motivates this multi-stop railway freight loading and unloading problem. Considering the aforementioned operational features, a fresh variant of the bin packing problem (BPP) can be defined, i.e., the Temporal BPP with FILO policy (TBPP-FILO). This novel variant incorporates the sequential requirements of loading and unloading processes, presenting a unique and difficult challenge compared to existing BPP variants. A hybrid Benders decomposition approach is developed using the technique of Lagrangian relaxation, which adjusts the allowance of capacity violation through the update of Lagrangian multipliers.

Keywords

Status: accepted

Back to the list of papers