Redesigning the Commercial Organization of CSX: An Organizational Portfolio Analysis

In 2001, CSX Corporation (CSX) reorganized the structure of its merchandise commercial group from separate groups managing each commodity-based line of business to a more functionally structured organization. The move was intended to provide greater controls and expertise required to compete successfully in a new, post-merger environment. This paper details the former and redesigned organizational structure of CSX’s railroad business. It also describes the study and analytic techniques used to support the change. Organizational Portfolio Analysis is used to examine the interconnections among the external markets and the performance fluctuations of each line of business, in order to better comprehend management's challenges, as well as to examine the internal interconnections among the lines of businesses to distinguish between areas of autonomy and synergy

Redesigning the Commercial Organization of CSX: An Organizational Portfolio Analysis

In 2001, CSX Corporation (CSX) reorganized the structure of its merchandise commercial group from separate groups managing each commodity-based line of business to a more functionally structured organization. The move was intended to provide greater controls and expertise required to compete successfully in a new, post-merger environment. This paper details the former and redesigned organizational structure of CSX’s railroad business. It also describes the study and analytic techniques used to support the change. Organizational Portfolio Analysis is used to examine the interconnections among the external markets and the performance fluctuations of each line of business, in order to better comprehend management's challenges, as well as to examine the internal interconnections among the lines of businesses to distinguish between areas of autonomy and synergy

Redesigning the Commercial Organization of CSX: An Organizational Portfolio Analysis

In 2001, CSX Corporation (CSX) reorganized the structure of its merchandise commercial group from separate groups managing each commodity-based line of business to a more functionally structured organization. The move was intended to provide greater controls and expertise required to compete successfully in a new, post-merger environment. This paper details the former and redesigned organizational structure of CSX’s railroad business. It also describes the study and analytic techniques used to support the change. Organizational Portfolio Analysis is used to examine the interconnections among the external markets and the performance fluctuations of each line of business, in order to better comprehend management's challenges, as well as to examine the internal interconnections among the lines of businesses to distinguish between areas of autonomy and synergy

Real-life locomotive planning: New formulations and computational results

In this paper, the authors develop new formulations for the locomotive planning problem (LPP) which is one of the most important railroad optimization problems. The objective of the LPP is to assign a consist (a set of locomotives) to each train in a pre-planned train schedule so as to provide sufficient power to pull the trains from their origins to their respective destinations at minimal cost. This assignment plan should be repeatable every week. In an earlier paper, the authors developed a formulation for locomotive planning and proposed a novel two-phase solution approach using linear, integer, and network programming. However, that formulation did not incorporate all the real-world constraints needed to generate a fully implementable solution. In this paper, the authors extend that approach on several dimensions by adding new constraints to the planning problem desired by locomotive directors, and by developing additional formulations necessary to transition solutions of their models to practice. The authors propose two formulations for this generalized LPP: consist formulation, and hybrid formulation. Finally, the authors present detailed computational tests that demonstrate the efficacy of models and conduct case studies on a number of instances to obtain several insights

Real-life locomotive planning: New formulations and computational results

In this paper, we develop new formulations for the locomotive planning problem (LPP) which is one of the most important railroad optimization problems. The objective of the LPP is to assign a consist (a set of locomotives) to each train in a pre-planned train schedule so as to provide sufficient power to pull the trains from their origins to their respective destinations at minimal cost. This assignment plan should be repeatable every week. In an earlier paper, we developed a formulation for locomotive planning and proposed a novel two-phase solution approach using linear, integer, and network programming. However, that formulation did not incorporate all the real-world constraints needed to generate a fully implementable solution. In this paper, we extend that approach on several dimensions by adding new constraints to the planning problem desired by locomotive directors, and by developing additional formulations necessary to transition solutions of our models to practice. We propose two formulations for this generalized LPP: consist formulation, and hybrid formulation. Finally, we present detailed computational tests that demonstrate the efficacy of models and conduct case studies on a number of instances to obtain several insights.