Dear INFORMS Community,
The INFORMS Railway Applications Section has released the full problem and data sets for the 2019 Problem Solving Competition!!
Full problem and competition data sets
More details (rules, important dates, etc) can be found here
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) of each shipment to get to its final destination?
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Andrea Arias
Sr. Operations Research Scientist I
BNSF Railway
Fort Worth TX
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