Dynamic integrated planning of empty cars and railroad in a scheduled service network

The management of empty cars in a railway network is one of the key factors in improving railway network performance and management of the railway facilities. This paper presents a novel mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model to optimise the planning and scheduling of freight trains services, empty cars and routs in a railroad network. In the proposed model, swapping between empty and loaded cars, classifying different empties and loaded cars and blocking cars are considered to create efficient services with minimum total costs. A real case of railway network in Iran is conducted to verify and validate the proposed model. Also, different scenarios are evaluated and sensitivity analysis is performed on the important and effective parameters of the developed model. The acquired results indicate that the proposed model could be efficiently used for planning and scheduling empty cars in real service networks.