Rail-road terminals are the chain link between rail and road transport in
intermodal terminals. Inside rail-road terminals rail mounted gantry cranes
(RMGs) lift standardised load units (containers, swap bodies and trailers)
between trucks and wagons of trains (and also the intermediate storage area).
The operative optimization of road-rail terminals aims to fasten the
processing of load units while the workload of RMGs has to be minimized and
the utilisation of trains has to be maximized. Minimizing the RMGs workload
reduces costs for energy consumption and maintenance costs of the RMGs.
In particular, we
study three different operational optimization problems:
- The load planning defines physical settings of wagons and assigns load
units to so-called slots on wagons. The aim of load planning is to maximize
the utilisation of trains, while the total length of necessary loaded RMG
moves and the number of wagon setting changes have to be minimized.
- The storage planning defines storage positions for load units that
have to be intermediately stored. The aim of storage planning
is to omit unproductive RMG moves due to stacking conflicts and to minimize
the total length of loaded RMG moves.
- The crane planning schedules the RMGs. So for each RMG a sequence of
load unit transports is defined and the start times for all transports are
fixed. The aim of crane planning is to minimize the total length of the
empty RMG moves and minimize some costs for RMG setting changes.
Projects:
Together with the industrial partners Berghof (Mühlhausen), DB Netz (Frankfurt), and
Deutsche Umschlaggesellschaft Schiene-Straße (DUSS) mbH (Bodenheim) we
developed optimization methods for the operative rail-road terminal optimization
in practice. These methods were tested with the partners at the pilot terminal
in Kornwestheim (close to Stuttgart) and integrated in the terminal-software
BLU afterwards.
Publications:
-
F. Bruns, S. Knust [2012]:
Optimized load planning of trains in intermodal transportation,
OR Spectrum 34, 511-533.
-
F. Bruns, M. Goerigk, S. Knust, A. Schöbel [2014]:
Robust load planning of trains in intermodal transportation,
OR Spectrum 36, 631-668.
