How to Park Freight Trains on Rail-Rail Transshipment Yards: The Train Location Problem

In modern rail-rail transshipment yards huge gantry cranes spanning all railway tracks allow for an efficent transshipment of containers between different freight trains. This way, multiple trains loaded with cargo for varying destinations can be consolidated to a reduced number of homogeneous trains, which is an essential requirement of hub-and-spoke railway systems. An important problem during the daily operations of such a transshipment yard is the train location problem, which assigns each train of a given pulse to a railway track (vertical position) and decides on each train's parking position on the track (horizontal position), so that the distances of container movements are minimized and the overall workload is equally shared among cranes. For this problem a mathematical model is presented, different heuristic solution procedures are described and tested in a comprehensive computational study. The results show that our procedures allow for a remarkable reduction of train processing time compared to typical real-world train location policies.