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Diesel locomotive fueling problem (LFP) in railroad operations

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Abstract

About 75 % of the world’s railroads operate with diesel fuel. Even though European railroads rely on electric traction to a large extent, US railroads rely mostly on diesel fuel (100 % of US freight is hauled by diesel locomotives). Like in other industries there is intense competition to keep costs low; and in railroad operations based on diesel locomotives, the cost of fuel and its delivery is the major component of the overall cost. Since the cost of fuel is highly location dependent (due to local taxes and transportation costs between supply and demand points), locomotive fueling problem discussed in this paper is a critical problem in railroad operations. Given: the set of yards, the set of trains to operate, the locomotive assignments to trains, and the fuel cost and capacity data; this problem deals with finding the fueling plan for the various trains to minimize the total cost of fueling the locomotives. We describe three different algorithms, two based on greedy method and one using MIP model, that we used to solve this problem and highlight the summary of solutions obtained by each of them for comparisons of these algorithms.

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Acknowledgement

We thank RAS of INFORMS, and Kamlesh Somani, Juan C Morales for permission to use this problem as a case study problem for this chapter and for agreeing to maintain the statement of the problem for future readers at the site mentioned in [10]. This problem specified by the data sets here can be used as a classroom project problem illustrating the usefulness of the greedy method in real world applications. We thank the anonymous referee for valuable comments. This research project was funded by the United States-India Educational Foundation and the Fulbright Commission through the Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Fellowship granted to Bodhibrata Nag.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, Kolkata, 700104, India

    Bodhibrata Nag

  2. IOE, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109-2117, USA

    Katta G. Murty

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  1. Bodhibrata Nag
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  2. Katta G. Murty
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Correspondence to Bodhibrata Nag.

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Nag, B., Murty, K.G. Diesel locomotive fueling problem (LFP) in railroad operations. OPSEARCH 49, 315–333 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12597-012-0082-5

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