Tactical design of rail freight networks. Part II: Local search methods with statistical analysis

This paper deals with the statistical study of the local search methods which we used in Part I of this work. In that part, a tactical planning model of the rail freight transportation was defined as a network design model. Different local search methods have been used to solve it: Simulated Annealing, Tabu Search and a ‘Descent’ method. The solution and method convergence depends on the initial feasible solution and the convexity of the feasible region, so the comparison among them will be made with the help of statistical theory. Assuming the hypothesis that the distribution of local minima can be represented by the Weibull distribution, it is possible to obtain an approach to the global minimum and a confidence interval of this. The global minimum estimation has been used to compare the heuristic methods and the parameters for a given heuristic, and to obtain a stopping criterion.