ISBN 9783843901109

978-3-8439-0110-9, Reihe Mathematik

Katharina Beygang
On the Solution of Some Railway Freight Car Optimization Problems

184 Seiten, Dissertation Technische Universität Kaiserslautern (2011), Softcover, A5

Zusammenfassung / Abstract

We can encounter railway freight car optimization problems in all aspects of railroad life. They can be classified according to their main task into several sub-problems, e.g., fleet management, freight car distribution, time-tabling, crew scheduling, and shunting.

In this thesis, we consider a shunting problem in marshalling yards which turns out to be NP-hard. Thus, it seems unlikely to compute efficiently an optimal solution for large-scale instances. This motivates the search for fast algorithms providing upper and lower bounds on the optimal solution with provable and admissible performance guarantee.

Additionally, we model a network with a directed and weighted graph and propose an algorithmic approach for the empty freight car distribution problem. We have a closer look on a particular issue of this real-word problem which turns out to be a generalized network flow problem.