Philadelphia Meeting

The Fall 1999 INFORMS National Meeting will be held in Philadelphia, November 7-10, 1999. For more information, contact David Hunt, ALK Associates, the cluster chair, at 609-683-0220, ext. 132, or by e-mail at hunt@alk.com.  Click here for information about the full INFORMS conference, including hotel and venue information.

RASIG Roundtable "Rapid Simulation Modeling of Rail Operations." Sunday, Nov. 7, 1-5 PM, Marriott Hotel, Room 412 Coordinator,  Erick Wikum, Schneider National, 920-592-2159. Erick Wikum made  introductory remarks.   Alan Brown of Norfolk Southern related experiences in using simulation to impact decisions that required rapid response, Simulation on a Shoestring. Dr. John Carson of AutoSimulations Inc. suggested ways that software might aid in such exercises in Tools for Rapid Simulation Modeling for the Paper Switching Application.		Erick Wikum
Alan Brown	A Taste of Philadelphia	John Carson

Business Meeting

Dutch Treat Dinner Sunday Evening RASIG members and others who are interested gathered at the Plough and Stars for dinner.

Session 1 - Modal Perspectives on Transportation Logistics

This session will focus on presenting the issues and factors that are critical in freight transportation logistics. Methodologies used in addressing these logistics issues/factors by shipper and transportation service providers (primarily focusing on motor carrier and railroad) will be discussed.

• Railroad Perspective on Transportation Logistics, Noel Perry, Director Competitive Intelligence, Sales and Marketing, CSX Transportation.
• Trucking Perspective on Transportation Logistics, John Nienow, Director Transportation Engineering, Schneider National;
• Shipper Perspective on Transportation Logistics, Chris Philleo, Director - Manufacturing Engineering, Campbell Soup Company;

Session 2 - Rail Operations Planning

Optimizing Intermodal Rail Operations

We propose an optimization model designed to increase operational efficiency of intermodal trains. We explain how this model can be used in various planning settings, how it can be tailored, and how it can be extended to aid in decision making above and beyond intermodal train scheduling and container routing.

NS Locomotive Fleet Planning System (LPS)

We have created a locomotive fleet planning system based on NS Locomotive Routing Model developed at Princeton University CASTLE research lab.  The routing model has been calibrated for NS operations based on historical data.  LPS can be used to identify the tradeoffs between fleet size and locomotive utilization and train delay.  We present an overview of the software and a summary of fleet sizing experiment results.

Strategic Fleet Planning with Schedule Flexibility

In this talk, we present a strategic fleet planning system that was developed for a study at VIA Rail Canada. Given a target weekly train schedule with passenger demand, the system determines unit cycles such that demand is satisfied, inspection requirements are met, and total (fixed and variable) costs are minimized, while allowing some flexibility on train departure times. The system also includes a tool to evaluate passenger demand for a given train schedule.
 

Other Sessions of Interest

• Vehicle Scheduling & Routing, Sunday, 8:30-10:00.
• A Computer-Aided Solution for the Train Scheduling Problem
• A Railway Fleet Assignment Model Based on Multi-Commodity Flow
• Optimization of Freight & Fleet Management, Monday 8:15-9:45.
• Optimizing Intermodal Rail Operations
• Stochastic Maintenance & Production/Inventory Models, Tuesday 8:14-9:45
• Bayesian Replacement Strategies for Railroad Tracks
• TransportationTopics I, Tuesday 2:45-4:15
• The Effects of Scheduled Time Off for Railroad Extraboard Crews

Return to RASIG Home Page