Automatic Generation of Transshipment and Loading Plans Through a Linear Programming Model in Railway Terminal

Abstract

Before the aggressive consequences of European merchandise transport modes imbalance, which results from excessive use of roads and highways, increasing railway transport can make an evolution to a sustainable model easier. The hypothesis of this chapter consists in the possible contribution of quantitative models for operations improvement that take place in railway stations. Their contributions can help to improve service levels of combined transport modes, increasing their competitiveness and providing a more sustainable mobility system. This investigation has developed a model that provides trains’ automatic transferring plans generation. Particularly, the developed model for transferring containers between trains shows improvement in time response and in solutions quality related to classic manual systems used to deal with this task. The comparison among the given solutions by this model and the ones given by the traditional methods of railway companies shows without doubts improvements provided by the developed computer application.