Atlanta Meeting

Downtown Atlanta
The 2003 INFORMS National Meeting will be held in Atlanta, Georgia, October 19-22, 2003.  A RASIG cluster of of sessions and roundtable is being presented, put together by Mike Gorman, University of Dayton, as the cluster chair.

Click here for information about the full INFORMS conference.

Don't forget to see Canadian Pacific and Multimodal Applied Systems Edelman Award Presentation as 3:10 on Monday the 20th.

   

Roundtable -  "The Use of OR Techniques in Rail Policy Development from the Perspective of Both the Public and Private Sectors" - Sunday 1:30 - 5:00 pm

The RASIG Roundtable is chaired by Andreas E. Aeppli, Reebie Associates, aaeppli@reebie.com.

Panelists:

Raphael Kedar - Deputy Associate Administrator for Policy, Federal Railroad Administration, raphael.kedar@fra.dot.gov
Raphael will discuss the FRA's use of modeling tools in developing FRA policy on rail freight.

Charles ("Chuck") A. Spitulnik, McLeod, Watkinson & Miller, cspitulnik@mwmlaw.com

Chuck has been involved in a number of high-profile public/private partnerships, including the Alameda Corridor I and several recent New York regional studies. Chuck will present on the recent Cross Harbor studies, and discuss the benefits and shortcomings of modelling tools to identify needs for public rail facility investment."

Howard Rosen, CANAC, hrosen@canac.com

For several years, CANAC has been working on  behalf of Chicago's commuter rail authority, METRA, to perform capacity planning studies for a variety of lines.  With few  exceptions, most of METRA's lines carry significant freight traffic.   One of the key goals of CANAC's work has been to identify and  understand the impacts of operating mixed service, and to fairly attribute infrastructure requirements among the different users.


Business Meeting - Sunday 5:15-6:15 pm


RASIG Sponsored Sessions

Demand Forecasting for Railroad Systems, Sunday, 8:00-9:30 am

Chair: Kal Silverberg, Sr. Manager Service Design, BNSF Railway.

Replenishment Planning Possibilities for the Railroad Industry

Tony Player, Drew Carlyle, Tony Perri, Finmatica.

The presentation will explore possibilities for replenishment planning for rail cars in the railroad industry. Using state-of-the-art forecasting techniques and requirements planning, this presentation will show how organizations can reduce inventory costs and improve deliverability on product. The authors will look at initiating business process re-engineering in the railroad industry from reactive response to stock-outs to pro-active response requirements planning.

Freight Rail Applications, In Cooperation with Transportation Science & Logistics, Sunday, 10:00-11:30 am

Chair: David Hunt, Senior Associates, Cambridge Systematics.

The Use of Dynamic Car Scheduling to Improve Freight Railroad Service Reliability

Bruce Patty, Exostrategy Partners

An impediment to railroads garnering a larger share of the freight transportation market has been poor reliability. The inability to deliver a shipment on-time can be caused by events such as lack of adequate locomotive power, oversubscription of scheduled trains, weather, as well as by poor planning. The author discusses the benefits of dynamic car scheduling as well as the necessary changes to business processes needed in order to take advantage of multiple routing options.

Estimation of the Potential Demand for Rail Services Through Total Logistics Cost Modeling

Michael Gorman, University of Dayton

An impediment to railroads garnering a larger share of the freight transportation market has been poor reliability. The inability to deliver a shipment on-time can be caused by events such as lack of adequate locomotive power, oversubscription of scheduled trains, weather, as well as by poor planning. The author discusses the benefits of dynamic car scheduling as well as the necessary changes to business processes needed in order to take advantage of multiple routing options.

Quantifying Public Benefits of Freight Rail Investments: Modeling Issues and Challenges

David Hunt, Cambridge Systematics, Bengt Mutén, Reebie Associates.

Freight volumes are projected to double by the year 2020 and policy makers are faced with a crucial decision. Can the investment of public funds in freight rail help mitigate roadway congestion and lower highway costs? To help make this decision, there is a need for improved methods to quantify the expected public benefits. This work describes existing tools and methods used to estimate benefits accruing from investments in rail, and then discusses outstanding issues and modeling challenges.

Railroad Blocking and Scheduling Approaches, Monday, 8:00-9:30 am

Chair: Pooja Dewan, BNSF Railway.

Deriving Tag Tables from Algorithmic Blocking in First Class

Carl Van Dyke, David Friedman, Erika Yazid, Multimodal Applied Systems, Inc.

Most railways route railcars using a table lookup scheme that involves 400K+ business rules. Algorithmic routing of railcars uses far fewer business rules, decreases car miles and intermediate handlings, simplifies blocking plans and eases analysis. The FirstClass project between CSX and MultiModal developed a tool to translate algorithmic routing rules to the lookup rules. Hence railways can gain the benefits of algorithms without a major redesign of their legacy train operating systems.

A Decision Support System for Train Scheduling

Ravindra Ahuja, Krishna Jha, University of Florida, Dharma Acharya, CSX Transportation,  Pooja Dewan, BNSF Railway

The authors are developing a decision support system for train scheduling which will take as an input a blocking plan, a set of origin-destination shipments, and a given train schedule, and will allow us to assess the impact of adding trains, removing trains, changing train itinerary and its time schedule. The decision support system can also suggest a zero-based train schedule or some specific changes with maximum cost savings.

Solving Real-Life Railroad Blocking Problems

Jian Liu, Ravindra Ahuja, University of Florida, Dharma Acharya, CSX Transportation,  Pooja Dewan, BNSF Railway

Blocking problem is one of the most important problems in railroad scheduling. In this talk, the authors will give an overview of a very-large scale neighborhood search algorithm to solve this problem which is very robust, flexible and can easily incorporate a variety of practical constraints. the authors will also present computational results on solving these problems at CSX Transportation and BNSF Railway.

RASIG Student Paper Contest, Monday, 10:00-11:30 am

Chair: Edwin Kraft, Director- Operations Planning, Transportation Economics & Management Systems, Inc.

Bicriteria train scheduling for intercity passenger railroad planning applications

Xuesong Zhou, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering and Maryland Transportation Initiative, University of Maryland, Ming Zhong Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland.

A bicriteria train scheduling model is presented to minimize both (1) the expected waiting time at terminals and (2) the total travel time for high-speed and middle-speed trains in an intercity  passenger rail line. Based on a branch-and-bound framework, an effective dominance rule and a beam search algorithm are developed to generate Pareto optima and achieve the corresponding representative sets. This paper also presented amulti-mode resource constrained project scheduling model to explicitly capture acceleration and deceleration penalties in train operations. A case study based on Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railroad in China illustrates the methodology and compares the performance of the proposed algorithms.

New Approaches for Solving the Block-to-Train Assignment Problem

Krishna C. Jha, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Florida.

Railroads classify shipments into blocks to reduce intermediate handlings of cars. The block-to-train assignment problem consists of assigning these blocks to trains so that the shipments reach their destinations within their due dates, train capacities are satisfied, and the total cost of shipment is minimum. In this paper, we give integer programming formulations of this problem, propose several exact and heuristic algorithms to solve this problem, and present computational results on the data provided by a major US railroad.

Solving Real-Life Railroad Blocking Problems

Jian Liu, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Florida.

In this paper, we study the railroad blocking problem, an important railroad planning problem.  We develop a very large-scale neighborhood search algorithm which is very robust and efficient, is highly scalable, and can handle a variety of practical constraints needed for a successful deployment of a blocking algorithm. We report computational results of this algorithm on the data provided by three major US railroad companies which demonstrate annual savings in tens of millions of dollars.

Timetable Buffer Magnitude and Allocation; An Analysis Using Simulation

Steven Harrod, University of Cincinnati.

A railway simulation model is configured to measure delay to alighting passengers due to train delays. Using commercial search algorithms, improved buffer allocation solutions are chosen based on measures of passenger delay instead of train delay. These allocations differ from the traditional assignment of timetable buffer or “slack” to the end of the journey.  Customer satisfaction can be significantly improved with minor changes to the service delivery system.

Other Presentations of Interest

Perfecting the Scheduled Railroad: Model-Driven Operating Plan Development, Edelman Competition 2003 Award Winner, Monday, 3:10-4:00 pm

The Need for a Model of Rail Operations to Improve Engineer Schedules, Monday 4:30-6:00 pm

Application of Seat Inventory Control to Intercity Passenger Rail, Tuesday 4:30-6:00 pm

Base Case Risk Assessment in US Railroad Systems, Wednesday 10:00-11:30 am


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Updated 17 October  2003