TECHNOLOGICAL NECESSITY FOR TRAIN MAKING-UP AND SCHEDULING UPDATING

Abstract

The number of freight cars in Russia has considerably increased lately (more than 1 mln units in 2011), but the rate of satisfied demands of customers for freightage has on the contrary reduced. The time of delivery is increasing. As there is no shortage in cars the problem resides in non-efficient operation of private car rolling stock. The capacity of reduction of delivery time should be considered through reducing staying idle time and delays under technical and loading operations rather than by increasing technical speed. So the problem of enhancement of freightage should be seen and approached firstly as an economic and technological process.

According to technology in force the car traffic is organized in conformity with the plan of train making-up. But the plan, which is adopted for a full year period, is optimum for a certain assessed volume of car traffic. As a rule, it’s the most probable value of traffic density. And there are considerable fluctuations from and towards the average value during the year.

In order to put the plan of train making-up in conformity with real traffic density it is proposed to implement the technology of prompt updating of train making-up plan and of selection of car traffic operation. The updating supposes the choice of a variant that permits to deliver all goods in time, depending on their logistics characteristics, and with minimum possible costs. It should be taken into account that the updating of train making-up plan at one station has a direct, and sometimes, negative impact on the plans of other stations of a rail network. In order to avoid negative effects it is necessary to compute critical max and min values of car traffic that allow maintaining the actual plan.

The proposed planning and scheduling are based on a simulation model, that, processing data on the approaching trains, number of the cars within the local network and their logistics characteristics, results in scheduling the trains traffic towards destination point.

The patterns of integrated computation are shown for departing routing and for through trains planning.