Deadline: 2019-05-10 Award: $3,750 Open to: Practitioners of operations research and management science*
An essential problem in freight rail transportation is how to efficiently deliver shipments moving between different origin destination pairs on a capacity-constrained physical rail network.
In this competition participants will be asked to determine a minimum-cost shipment plan given a demand of shipments with their corresponding origin and destination which satisfies operational system constraints.
The shipment plan must answer the following questions: (1) what pairs of stations should have direct train services between them? (2) what are the frequencies for these train services? (3) what is the path (sequence of stations) for each train service? (4) what is the itinerary (sequence of blocks and sequence of trains carrying the blocks) of each shipment to get to its final destination?