|
|
|
|
Locomotive Shop Router
A typical large freight railroad in the United States owns between 4,000 to 8,000 locomotives, each costing millions of dollars. Each locomotive must be sent to a shop for quarterly maintenance every 92 days. If it cannot reach a shop within that time period, it becomes past-due-Q (PDQ) and needs to be towed by another locomotive.
The challenge that locomotive managers face is how to best direct locomotives to shops just-in-time, neither too early or late, in such a manner that the number of locomotives arriving at a shop on a daily basis is consistent with the shop’s capacity. This is a real-time decision problem, as all locomotives are dynamically moving across the railroad network pulling trains where disruptions (such as train delays, train cancellations, and locomotive breakdowns) continue to occur.
The Innovative Locomotive Shop Router (ILSR) optimization engine assists locomotive managers in this complex decision-making process. ILSR receives periodic data from a railroad’s live system regarding its trains and locomotives, and then generates the assignment of locomotives to shops. It generates scheduled shop dates for all locomotives, taking into account network-wide shop capacities. Further, for each locomotive scheduled for maintenance within the next week, it recommends which shop it should go to, as well as the route of the locomotive to that shop over the current set of scheduled trains.
ILSR is an optimization engine developed using state-of-the-art operations research techniques. It is already in production at CSX Transportation, a major freight railroad in the United States, where it has significantly reduced the number of past-due-Q locomotives and considerably improved shop flows.
ILSR is available for immediate licensing and can be integrated with your real-time production systems and customized to your company’s specific needs.
|
Brochure
|
|
|
