Synthetic optimization model and algorithm for railway freight center station location and wagon flow organization problem

Abstract

The railway freight center stations location and wagon flow organization in railway transport are interconnected, and each of them is complicated in a large-scale rail network. In this paper, a two-stage method is proposed to optimize railway freight center stations location and wagon flow organization together. The location model is present with the objective to minimize the operation cost and fixed construction cost. Then, the second model of wagon flow organization is proposed to decide the optimal train service between different freight center stations. The location of the stations is the output of the first model. A heuristic algorithm that combined tabu search (TS) with adaptive clonal selection algorithm (ACSA) is proposed to solve those two models. The numerical results show the proposed solution method is effective. © 2014 Xing-cai Liu et al.