A Model for the Optimal Programming of Railway Freight Train Movements

Abstract

The area of railroad scheduling and associated problems offers a potentially fruitful field for research in management science. The mass of data; the need for considering numerous aspects of the problem simultaneously; and the variety of restrictions (arising from the technology, labor agreements and government regulation) make the control of day to day operations a management problem of great complexity. The problems at this level are further compounded by the need for developing, at the same time, methods for planning and evaluating major changes in facilities. Such methods, if they are to be effective, must be capable of tracing out the implications of these changes on the day to day operation and appraising the results in the light of the long-run objectives of the railroad. This paper is an account of an attempt to apply certain techniques of management science to some of these scheduling problems as they were found to exist on a large terminal switching railroad.