Analysis of Hump Operation at a Railroad Classification Yard

Maria Gisela Bardossy

2015

Abstract

Railroad classification yards play a significant role in freight transportation: shipments are consolidated to benefit from economies of scales. However, the disassembling of inbound trains, the classification of railcars and reassembling of outbound trains add significant time to the overall transportation. Determining the operational schedule of a railroad classification yard to ensure that railcars pass as quickly as possible through the yard to continue with their journey to their final destination is a challenging problem. In this paper, we create a simulation model to mimic the dynamics of a classification yard and investigate the effect of two simple but practical priority rules (train length and arrival time) for the sequencing of inbound trains through the humping operation. We monitor the effect of these rules on performance measures such as average wait time (dwell time) at the yard and daily throughput as the complexity and frequency of the trains vary. We run the simulation on four data sets with low and high complexity of trains and low and high frequency of trains.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Bardossy M. (2015). Analysis of Hump Operation at a Railroad Classification Yard . In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Simulation and Modeling Methodologies, Technologies and Applications - Volume 1: SIMULTECH, ISBN 978-989-758-120-5, pages 493-500. DOI: 10.5220/0005546704930500

in Bibtex Style

@conference{simultech15,
author={Maria Gisela Bardossy},
title={Analysis of Hump Operation at a Railroad Classification Yard},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Simulation and Modeling Methodologies, Technologies and Applications - Volume 1: SIMULTECH,},
year={2015},
pages={493-500},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0005546704930500},
isbn={978-989-758-120-5},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Simulation and Modeling Methodologies, Technologies and Applications - Volume 1: SIMULTECH,
TI - Analysis of Hump Operation at a Railroad Classification Yard
SN - 978-989-758-120-5
AU - Bardossy M.
PY - 2015
SP - 493
EP - 500
DO - 10.5220/0005546704930500