Industrial and Systems Engineering
University of Florida

EIN 6918: Graduate Seminar
Spring 2008

April 3, 2008

3PM, MAEB 211

The Load Planning Problem at an Intermodal Railroad Terminal

Ashish Nemani

Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

University of Florida

Abstract

In this paper, we study the load planning problem (LPP) arising at an intermodal railroad terminal. The LPP is to assign the containers and trailers on the given set of railcars to maximize train utilization and aerodynamic efficiency. The solution to the problem must also satisfy several operational and regulatory requirements. We formulate the LPP as an integer program on an underlying network and solve it to optimality using CPLEX. The run-time of the CPLEX optimizer increases exponentially with the network size, and it fails to solve the modest size problems in reasonable time. To efficiently solve these real-life instances, we propose two multi-exchange neighborhood search algorithms. Our empirical studies demonstrate that these algorithms are able to solve the problems of modest size in reasonable time. The additional advantage of our approach is the flexibility to incorporate any new business requirement.