Model of wagons' placing-in and taking-out problem in a railway station and its heuristic algorithm

Abstract

Placing-in and taking-out wagons timely can decrease wagons' dwell time in railway stations, improve the efficiency of railway transportation, and reduce the cost of goods transportation. We took the locomotive running times between goods operation sites as weights, so the wagons' placing-in and taking-out problem could be regarded as a single machine scheduling problem, 1pijCmax, which could be transformed into the shortest circle problem in a Hamilton graph whose relaxation problem was an assignment problem. We used a Hungarian algorithm to calculate the optimal solution of the assignment problem. Then we applied a broken circle and connection method, whose computational complexity was O(n2), to find the available satisfactory order of wagons' placing-in and taking-out. Complex problems, such as placing-in and transferring combined, taking-out and transferring combined, placing-in and taking-out combined, or placing-in, transferring, and taking-out combined, could also be resolved with the extended algorithm. A representative instance was given to illustrate the reliability and efficiency of our results.