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...

This paper aims to study the locomotive assignment problem which is very important for railway companies, in view of high cost of operating locomotives. This problem is to determine the minimum cost assignment of homogeneous locomotives located in some central depots to a set of pre-scheduled trains in order to provide sufficient power to pull the trains from their origins to their destinations...

Intention– Cyclic locomotive assignment planning is a specific type of organization of locomotive usage, and in fact, it means putting the complete workload to a closed chain, which is repeated periodically. The concept of cyclic locomotive assignment planning type organization in the area of train traction has proven in practice as the best one, but as it is made for in-advance defined timetab...

This paper aims to study the locomotive routing problem (LRP) which is one of the most important problems in railroad scheduling in view of involving expensive assets and high cost of operating locomotives. This problem is assigning a fleet of locomotives to a network of trains to provide sufficient power to pull them from their origins to destinations by satisfying a rich set of operational con...

Given a schedule of trains, the locomotive planning (or scheduling) problem (LPP) is to determine the minimum cost assignment of locomotive types to trains that satisfies a number of business and operational constraints. Once this is done, the railroad has to determine the sequence of trains to which each locomotive is assigned by unit number so that it can be fueled and serviced as necessary. ...

We propose a new decomposition model and a multi-column generation algorithm for solving the Locomotive Assignment Problem (LAP). The decomposition scheme relies on consist configurations, where each configuration is made of a set of trains pulled by the same set of locomotives. We use the concept of conflict graphs in order to reduce the number of trains to be considered in each consist config...

The locomotive scheduling problem (or the locomotive assignment problem) is to assign a consist (a set of locomotives) to each train in a pre-planned train schedule so as to provide them sufficient power to pull them from their origins to their destinations. Locomotive scheduling problems are among the most important problems in railroad scheduling. In this paper, we report the results of a stu...

Locomotive assignment is a classic planning problem in railway industry. Different models and algorithms (e.g., network flow model, MIP model, adaptive dynamic programming) are proposed to solve this problem and have got remarkable progress. In practice, the locomotives are usually in the size of hundreds to even more than a thousand. So assigning individual locomotives to trains on railway net...