Metaheuristic for the Integrated Approach to the Freight Train Routing and Block-to-train Assignment

Freight railroad transportation is a critical issue in an economic setting with growing concern about pollution and road congestion. With an efficient management, the rail option for freight transportation may lead to more competitive costs. In this article, the authors address one part of the complex issue of freight railroad transportation, which deals with the definition of train routes and, simultaneously, with the way freight is carried from its origin to its destinations. The integration of these two problems is called Train Design. A new genetic algorithm is proposed to solve this problem, which tries to find a freight processing order so that the iterative dispatch subproblems leads to a lower global cost solution. Some results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

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