Dear INFORMS Community,
INFORMS Railway Applications Section is pleased to announce that 2019 Rail Problem Competition problem description and dataset have been posted.
https://connect.informs.org/railway-applications/awards/problem-solving-competition
Registration deadline is May 17th, 2019.
Direct all questions to: railwayapplicationssection@gmail.com
Problem chair: Andrea Arias Llorenty (BNSF)
Problem owners: Xuesong Zhou (ASU), Boliang Lin (BJTU)
Integrated train blocking and shipment path optimization (TBSP)
An essential problem in freight rail transportation is how to efficiently deliver shipments moving between different origin destination pairs on a capacity-constrained physical rail network. In this competition participants will be asked to determine a minimum-cost shipment plan given a demand of shipments with their corresponding origin and destination which satisfies operational system constraints. The shipment plan must answer the following questions: (1) what pairs of stations should have direct train services between them? (2) what are the frequencies for these train services? (3) what is the path (sequence of stations) for each train service? (4) what is the itinerary (sequence of blocks and sequence of trains carrying the blocks) of each shipment to get to its final destination?
Watch for the full problem description on April 19th!!
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Andrea Arias Llorenty
Chair INFORMS RAS 2019 Problem Solving Competition
Sr. Operations Research Specialist I
BNSF Railway
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Andrea Arias
Sr. Operations Research Scientist I
BNSF Railway
Fort Worth TX
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