Freight railway network design problem

In freight railway networks, commodities are usually transported via hubs, which are called marshaling or shunting yards, depending on their capacity. Consequently, the number and locations of these yards effect the transport costs to a great extent. The goal of our work is to reduce the freight transport and yard operation costs by determining the optimal number and locations of the yards. Therefore, we have defined an optimization problem, which integrates the hub location and multicommodity network design problems. The problem is intended for the real freight railway network of SBB Cargo. Due to the network and transport demand sizes, we are developing a heuristic algorithm to solve the problem. The algorithm combines ideas of the adaptive large neighborhood search, for the yards location task, and the prioritized passenger assignment algorithm, adapted for the task of commodities routing. In this talk, we will present the defined problem, algorithm, and preliminary results.