There is a significant interaction between sizing a fleet of rail cars and its utilization. This paper presents a new multi-period mathematical model and a solution procedure to optimize the rail-car fleet size and freight car allocation, wherein car demands, and travel times, are assumed to be deterministic, and unmet demands are backordered. This problem is considered NP-complete. In other wo...

Nonlinear vibration of parabolic springs employed in suspension system of a freight car has been studied in this paper. First, dynamical behavior of the springs is investigated by using finite element method and the obtained results are then used in vibration analysis of a railway freight car. For this purpose, dynamics of a parabolic spring subjected to a cyclic excitation has been studied ...

the aim of this paper is to present an efficient method for a rail freight car fleet sizing problem. this problem is modeled mathematically as a multi-period, dynamic and multi-objective, in which the rail freight wagons are assumed to be heterogeneous. demands for different wagons and all travel times are assumed deterministic. in order to increase the utilization of the available wagons in th...

The design of European two–axle freight wagons can be traced back to the 1890’es. It has been and still is widely used in Europe because it is simple, rugged and cheap in price and maintenance. The internationally approved suspension for two–axle freight wagons in Europe is known as the UIC standard suspension (see Fig. 1). Each wagon has four of these suspensions. They consist of a leaf spring...

In this paper a new reinforcement learning system for generating marshaling plan of freight cars in a train is designed. In the proposed method, the total transfer distance of a locomotive is minimized to obtain the desired layout of freight cars for an outbound train. The order of movements of freight cars, the position for each removed car, the layout of cars in a train and the number of cars...

Cars in rail freight service follow prescribed routes from their origin via intermediate shunting yards to their destination. The goal in designing such routes is to reduce the number of trains and their travel distances. Various real-world hard constraints make the problem difficult to formulate and also to solve. We present integer programming formulations for this car routing problem arising...