A planning approach for freight transportation operations in railway networks

The development of new technologies for the automatic transfer of loading units between rail and road will enable faster handling operations at railway terminals in the next years. For this reason, railway transportation can be thought as a transportation on networks where cargo units change different trains, at different terminals, before reaching their destination. This paper aims at the definition of an optimization problem for planning transportation operations in railway networks in order to meet the demand defined as aggregated orders, by defining, for each container, the path, the sequence of trains and wagons and the sequence of terminals. This problem is faced in two phases: firstly, a preprocessing analysis is realized in order to compute some data sets which do not depend on planning decisions but only on problem data; secondly, the planning phase is realized by the definition of a linear binary integer programming problem.