Optimization at Deutsche Bahn: Aspects and Examples

For large transportation companies like Deutsche Bahn, process optimization has always been an important task to reduce production costs and obtain a better position in competition. Applying methods of mathematical optimization in practice often is rather difficult though, which may lead to some unique constraints that could make the optimization process rather hard. This contribution shall discuss some practical issues for mathematical optimization at Deutsche Bahn and will give some examples

Routing Cars in Rail Freight Service

Cars in rail freight services at Deutsche Bahn follow prescribed routes from their origin via intermediate shunting yards to their destination. The main goal in designing such routes is to reduce the number of trains and their travel distances. Various real-world capacity constraints make the problem difficult to formulate and also to solve. We present MILP and MINLP models for this problem based on multicommodity flows and arborescences. We compare these formulations using test- and real-world data