Strategic planning of an automatic freight railway terminal
by
Claudia Caballini
CIELI - Italian Centre of Excellence in Integrated Logistics
Coauthors: Pier Paolo Puliafito, Simona Sacone, Silvia Siri

The current highly competitive context in freight transportation implies the need to increasingly speed up operations of cargo loading/unloading among different transportation modes. For this reason new technologies are being developed in order to reduce delays at terminals and to optimize handling operations.

This work regards the strategic planning of a freight railway terminal where the transfer of cargo units between road and rail is supposed to be automatic and realized horizontally. In particular the research is willing to optimize the terminal layout, in terms of physical structural elements and number of handling resources, taking into consideration the average traffic flows in the terminal and some physical constraints. The final goal is that of minimizing the total transfer times and the overall costs of cargo handling systems.

This planning problem has been formalized as a mathematical programming problem where the decision variables indicate how many handling resources (of different types) must be used, corresponding to a linear IP problem. This formulation has been implemented with Cplex solver and tested on real case studies.

Date received: April 29, 2008