Assignment

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Operations Research

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Application of OR in Indian Railways
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Submitted by: Sidhartha Harichandan (215118049)

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Submitted to:
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Dr. S. Srinivasan
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Professor
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Department of Management Studies

National Institute of Technology, Trichy

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 Researchers and practitioners alike have applied many Operational Research techniques in
Transportation sector, for both tactical as well as operational issues. There is still tremendous
scope for application of OR techniques to optimize the Railway Operations. The broad areas
identified by OR professionals are;

1. Line capacity estimation

2. Strategic problems
3. Capacity planning (infrastructure)
4. Tactical problems (a. Timetabling, b. Fleet planning c. Crew scheduling)
5. Operational problems (a. Train control b. Dynamic scheduling c. Dynamic pricing)

Experts from their research have identified areas in Indian Railways having potential
for optimization;

1. Definition of capacity on railway section

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2. Capturing congestion effects and broad scheduling strategies

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3. Medium term capacity investments in signalling

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4. Trade-off between through put (number of trains) handled and transit time (average)
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5. Strategic decisions (railways)

6. Robust capacity: capacity in the presence of failure

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7. Signalling failures modelled and impact on train running quantified

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8. Quantify the trade-off between achievable headway and service measures (such as
punctuality and average delays suffered by trains) under a given pattern of failure
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9. Railways (capacity analysis) (a. Terminal capacity b. Capability of handling trains at

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terminals)

10. Routing possibilities: Look-ahead period and a routing algorithm applied on an

appropriate time-space network
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11. Timetabling
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12. Master chart preparation tool for railway planning

13. Rake linking

14. Long distance trains (a. coaching stock utilization (integrated with maintenance schedules
at terminals) b. Timetables as an input)

15. Suburban trains (a. Integrated with timetables b. Maintenance schedules as an input)

16. Long distance rake linking

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 17. Terminal maintenance line charts (pit lines and washing lines - also considering
constraints on line length and time for maintenance)

18. Rake link table (constraints on length of run between two maintenance points and rake
compatibility)

19. Typical patterns of rake linking (self linking, interchange of day trains)

20. Marketing and Pricing models

a. Network based models for pricing (based on second shortest distance)

b. Marketing and service planning

21. Containers/Trucking: Fleet utilization and locational imbalance based pricing model

22. Supply chain view of transport operations: Freight supply chains on Indian Railways

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The airline industry has been integrating the different modules of the scheduling process to

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extract more efficiency out of the system. There has been a lot of research in the area of

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recovery models and algorithms for real-time railway disturbance and disruption

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management. Currently these decisions are taken manually without the support of Intelligent
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Support Systems. The problem of rescheduling is basically,
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• Timetable rescheduling
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• Rolling stock rescheduling

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• Crew rescheduling
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The techniques used are Alternative Graph Model, Branch and Bound Algorithm, Mixed
Integer Programming, Job Shop Scheduling Method, Heuristic Greedy Approach, Fix and
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Regenerate Algorithm, Genetic Algorithm, Artificial Neural Network.

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However the issues which are most important for Indian Railways are

1. LOCOMOTIVE ASSIGNMENT PROBLEM

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2. OPTIMAL DESIGN OF TIME TABLES

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3. DYNAMIC PRICING OF SERVICES

LOCOMOTIVE ASSIGNMENT PROBLEM

This issue is a very complex one and researchers all over the world have been grappling with
the problem. The extent of the problem has been highlighted in a problem solved by Ahuja et
al. (2005). They used a mixed integer programming (MIP) formulation of the problem that
contained about 197 thousand integer variables and 67 thousand constraints. An MIP of this
size could not be solved to optimality or near-optimality in acceptable running times using
commercially available software. Using problem decomposition, integer programming, and

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 very large-scale neighbourhood search, they developed a solution technique to solve the
problem of CSX Transportation, a major US railroad company, within 30 minutes of
computation time on a Pentium III computer. As compared to the software in-house
developed by CSX, there was an estimated a savings of over 400 locomotives, which
translated into savings of over one hundred million dollars annually. CSX Transportation
problem was Locomotive assignment for 538 trains, with different weekly frequencies, 119
stations and 5 types of locomotives. In a week the total number of trains which differed in a
running day was 3324 and the resulting weekly space-time network consists of 8798 nodes
(events) and 30134 arcs (train trips).

OPTIMAL DESIGN OF TIME TABLES

This is basically a train scheduling problem. It can be classified into static and dynamic
scheduling. In static scheduling, there is information of all the trains beforehand. But in
dynamic it is available sometimes only when it enters the network. Even the static time table

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can have two dimensions, off-line timetabling and real time dispatching.

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• “good” constraints, with which the problem is solvable very easily

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• “bad” constraints that make it very hard to solve.

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DYNAMIC PRICING OF SERVICES
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In the interim budget speech by Railway Minister in Feb 2014, it was mentioned that an
independent Rail Tariff Authority is being set up to rationalize fares and there was a proposal
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to expand dynamic pricing of tickets in line with the airline industry. Indian Railways
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introduced several premium trains with dynamic ticket pricing on IRCTC that can only be
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reserved online. The dynamic fare pattern is similar to the one used by airlines going up with
demand. The fare applicable to each day/transaction is indicated at the time of booking on the
IRCTC’s e-ticketing website.
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