A heuristic for routing and scheduling freight trains in a passenger rail network

This paper addresses the problem of routing and scheduling freight trains in a rail network where passenger trains must adhere to a strict schedule and freight train movements can be inserted at any time or as demands arise, without disrupting passenger trains. An exemplar of such a situation is the Indian Railway System. The problem is formulated as a 0-1 mixed integer programme to minimise the sum of travel times of the freight trains in a passenger rail network, for which a lower bound is developed. We propose a hierarchical permutation heuristic, which identifies the route and schedule for freight trains one at a time in a passenger rail network. A number of dispatching rules are proposed for identifying the best hierarchy in which trains must be scheduled. We report the computational experience for solving various problems based upon real data. Copyright © 2007 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.