Title of Document: MULTI-CARRIER TRACK CAPACITY ALLOCATION IN FORWARD AND SPOT MARKETS OF FREIGHT TRANSPORT April Yi-Wen Kuo, Doctor of Philosophy, 2008 Directed By: Associate Professor, Elise Miller-Hooks, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering This dissertation addresses multi-carrier, multi-line train scheduling problems for forward and spot markets. Schedules resulting from solut...

Trouble of moving Freight car Detection System (TFDS) constitutes an important part of the railway safety warning systems. With TFDS, dynamic images of freight cars are captured by high-speed cameras, timely transmitted to the train inspection center by special optical fiber network and finally observed for fault recognition. In this paper, an automatic fault recognition method for side frame k...

Goal, Scope and Background. As part of an LCA study comparing an average Dutch passenger car running on petrol with a similar car running on bio-ethanol and comparing an average Dutch passenger car running on diesel with a similar car running on biodiesel, the question raised to get more insight into the allocations made in fossil fuel chains in existing databases such as ecoinvent. Both biofue...

Introduction In recent years there have been major changes in the composition of cargo to the point where, in Europe, semi-finished products (e.g. car parts) and finished goods represent the greatest transport demand. This type of cargo is typically of lower density and higher value (LDHV) than previous goods and requires faster and more reliable transportation. Currently, LDHV goods are predom...

This paper presents a modelling approach to characterise private car shopping trips in a city logistics point of view, in order to connect these movements with those belonging to urban freight distribution in the supply chain. The proposed modelling framework is a two-step procedure articulated as follows. First, an attraction model estimates the number of private car shopping trips arriving to...

Diwakar Gupta is a Professor and Director of Graduate Studies for the ISyE Graduate Program at the University of Minnesota. Diwakar received his PhD in Management Sciences from the University of Waterloo and taught at the McMaster University's DeGroote School of Business before joining the University of Minnesota. His research interests are in the area of stochastic models for service/ producti...

Tactical planning of operations is comprised of a set of interrelated decisions that aim to ensure an optimal allocation and utilization of resources to achieve the economic and customer service goals of the company. Tactical planning is particularly vital for intercity freight carriers that make intensive use of consolidation operations. Railways and less-than-truckload motor carriers are typi...

The locomotive assignment and the freight train scheduling are important problems in railway transportation. Freight cars are coupled to form a freight rake. The freight rake becomes a train when a locomotive is coupled to it. The locomotive assignment problem assigns locomotives to a set of freight rakes in a way that, with minimum locomotive deadheading time, rake coupling delay and locomotiv...