A dynamic model for railway freight overbooking

In order to apply overbooking idea in Chinese railway freight industry to improve revenue, a Markov decision process(dynamic programming) model for railway freight reservation was formulated and the overbooking limit level was proposed as a control policy. However, computing the dynamic programming treatment needs six nested loops and this will be burdensome for real-world problems. To break through the calculation limit, the properties of value function were analyzed and the overbooking protection level was proposed to reduce the calculating quantity. The simulation experiments show that the overbooking protection level for the lower-fare class is higher than that for the higher-fare class, so the overbooking strategy is nested by fare class. Besides, by analyzing the influence on the overbooking strategy of freight arrival probability and cancellation probability, the proposed approach is efficient and also has a good application prospect in reality. Also, compared with the existing reservation(FCFS), the overbooking strategy performs better in the fields of vacancy reduction and revenue improvement.

Discussion on the Logistics Construction of Railway Container Freight Stations

From the perspective of logistics, the article discusses some essential functions and service functions of railway container freight stations. Then it plans the construction of the logistics operation system of container freight stations, and designs five main operating yards such as deconsolidation and groupage .yard, storage and distribution yard, container receiving-departure yard, container stack yard, and special cargo yard. The management pattern is discussed under the direction of modern business management theory. The ideas presented in this article is significant to the construction of railway container freight stations.

A review on design and testing methodologies of modern freight train draft gear system

Rolling stock connection systems are key to running longer and heavier trains as they provide both the connections of vehicles and the damping,providing the longitudinal suspension of the train.This paper focuses on the evolution of both connection and stiffness damping systems.Focus is on freight rolling stock,but passenger draw gears are also examined.It was found that connection systems have evolved from the buff and chain system used in the pioneer railways of the 1800s to the modern auto-coupler connection systems that are in-service worldwide today.Refined versions of the buff and chain coupling are,however,still in use in the EU,UK,South America and India.A wide range of auto-coupler systems are currently utilised,but the AAR coupler(Janney coupler)remains the most popular.A further variation that persists is the SA3 coupler(improved Wilson coupler)which is an alternative auto-coupler design used mainly throughout the former Soviet Union.Restricting the review to auto-coupler systems allowed the paper to focus on draft gears which revealed polymer,polymer-friction,steel spring-friction,hydraulic draft gears and sliding sill cushioning systems.Along with the single compressive draft gear units balanced and floating plate configurations are also presented.Typical draft gear acceptance standards are presented along with modelling that was included to aid in presentation of the functional characteristics of draft gears.

Coordinated Dispatch of Integrated Electricity-Natural Gas System and the Freight Railway Network

With the significant development of liquefied natural gas(LNG)rail transport,the railway system is increasingly more closely connected with the integrated electricity-natural gas system(IEGS).To coordinate the economic operations of the two systems,this paper innovatively proposes a coordinated dispatch model of IEGS with LNG infrastructures and a freight railway network with LNG transport.First,an operational scheduling model of the railway network,considering energy consumption,is put forward for both LNG transmission and ordinary freight transport.Then,the coordinated dispatch problem of IEGS and the railway network is formulated into a mixed-integer linear programming model via the big M method and a modified incremental linearization approach.Finally,a bi-level optimization algorithm based on generalized benders decomposition(GBD)is presented to solve the coordinated dispatch problem due to the restrictions on exchanging private information.Case studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model and algorithm as well as the potential benefit for wind power accommodation.