Freight traffic planning and rolling stock scheduling management tool

A railway organisation is designed to provide economies of scale in a country’s freight traffic system and it is on this understanding that a need has been observed to prompt a design for a Freight Traffic Planning and Rolling Stock Scheduling Management Tool that will ensure optimum allocation and utilisation of resources, and timely delivery of customer goods. Literature related to freight traffic planning and wagon scheduling is explored in an attempt to find the best solution alternatives in order to develop a programme for freight traffic planning and wagon scheduling that will optimise resource utilisation. However, several aspects have to be additionally taken into account, such as cyclic departures of the trains from stations, available loads at stations, types of wagons required for given commodity types, destinations, locomotive types, and transfer of wagons between or at stations i.e. attaching and or detaching wagons in transit. The model is formulated as a goal programming problem, and solutions are obtained using VB.Net on ORACLE Database. The solutions give proper knowledge of available business (freight traffic) at any station nationwide; knowledge and position of all wagons by types at anytime; proper allocation and scheduling of wagons to take available business in terms of priority and monitored wagon distribution nationwide. Locomotive and Wagon availability revolved around 74 and 66% respectively. Computational results for several test instances are presented