Planning Australian freight rail operations: An overview

After a brief outline of freight rail operations planning, the paper reviews the research and development of optimization and simulation tools to undertake train planning, train and locomotive scheduling, as well as track maintenance planning. Although optimum solutions can be obtained using such tools, they have not been widely embraced by rail organizations. The simplifying assumptions made by most models make their practical application difficult to achieve. Whilst drawing on overseas research, the paper focuses mainly on the Australian experience for operations planning practice. Freight rail market share increases are closely related to the level of service offered, particularly in transit times and reliability of arrivals. Both these two levels of service attributes are associated with track infrastructure design and maintenance standards. The paper summarizes some of the requirements for track maintenance planning, and describes a model designed to optimize the location of sidings on a single track corridor. Considerable research has been devoted to the development of operations research applications for individual planning and control tasks. However, the use of such techniques to optimize an entire rail operation, subject to resource and customer service constraints, has not been attempted. This is mainly due to the complexity of the overall task, and the degree to which practical issues prevent optimal solutions from being implemented. The use of simulation and expert systems approaches would seem to offer a useful practical path in operations planning.