Multi-route railroad blocking problem by improved model and ant colony algorithm in real world

In rail freight transportation, general merchandise freight cars may pass through many classification stations on their route from origin to destination. The Railroad Blocking Problem (RBP) is to reclassify inbound traffic from various origins in the classification stations and put them on outbound trains with the same or close destinations, the objective of the RBP is to minimize the total operating costs of delivering all traffic on the railway network while satisfying the resource and capacity constraints at the stations and the priority constraints for shipments. In this paper, we introduce a new mathematic model which can comprehensively describe the blocking strategy and various combinations of multi-route O–D pairs in large scale railway network. Furthermore, we propose an improved Ant Colony (AC) algorithm for RPB, and a computational experiment derived from the real life instances of coal heavy haul rail network in north China is given. Experimental results verified the validation of the model and effectiveness of the algorithm.