Routing Cars in Rail Freight Service

Cars in rail freight services at Deutsche Bahn follow prescribed routes from their origin via intermediate shunting yards to their destination. The main goal in designing such routes is to reduce the number of trains and their travel distances. Various real-world capacity constraints make the problem difficult to formulate and also to solve. We present MILP and MINLP models for this problem based on multicommodity flows and arborescences. We compare these formulations using test- and real-world data