Development of a Novel Freight Railcar Load Planning and Monitoring System

Abstract

Rail transport has unmistakable sustainable (environmental and economic) advantages in goods transportation on a massive scale. Goods loading constitutes an important segment of goods transportation by rail. Incorrect loading can be a serious threat to traffic safety as well as a generator of unforeseen expenses related to goods, railway infrastructure and vehicles. At the beginning, the paper identifies the presence of incorrect loading into freight railcars. The analysis of the available loading software has led to the conclusion that no software offers adequate support to the planning and monitoring of the loading of goods into a covered railcar using a forklift truck. For this reason, the main aim of the research is to formulate a mathematical model that includes real-world constraints, as well as the design and implementation of an original user-friendly load planning and monitoring software system. Experimental evaluations of the implemented software have been made based on single and multiple railcar pallet loading problems, considering the following three optimization criteria: maximization of wagon load weight, maximization of wagon volume utilization and maximization of weighted profit. By testing the optimization and visualization features of the software and analyzing the results, it has been concluded that it can offer full support to real load planning and monitoring problems.

A Hybrid Harmony Search Algorithm with Distribution Estimation for Solving the 0-1 Knapsack Problem

“…(3) Calculate the fitness value after initialization. (4) for i � 1 to J1 do (5) Find the worst and best harmony in the harmony memory database as p (6) Calculate fitness values and sort them (7) For i � 1: K% select the dominant population (8) e number of K populations with the highest fitness value was selected ( 9) end (10) For j � 1: N%% Generates new harmonies based on Guided Improvisation (11) Count the number of bags selected in each column (12) if rand < HMCR (13) r � ceil (HMS * rand) Randomly select the harmonic vector (14) if rand < PAR (15) If rand < probability (16) Update the corresponding harmonies (17) end (18) end (19) else Random mutation produces new harmonies (20) end (21) end for (22) e total capacity of the newly produced harmony is calculated (23) If the knapsack capacity requirement is met, the greedy selection is made under the constraint (24) If the knapsack capacity requirement is not met, the harmony is repaired (25) if fit (B) > fit (p) (26) Update the global lowest harmony ( 27) end (28) end for ALGORITHM 7: e HHSEDA algorithm for the 0-1 knapsack problem. worst value can indicate the advantages and disadvantages of each algorithm.…”

“…e 0-1 knapsack problem proposed by Fayard in 1975, is a typical combinatorial optimization problem [5] and a NP problem. It is widely applied in many areas such as investment decision making problems [6], cutting stock problem [7], the housing problem [8], cryptography [9], adaptive multimedia system [10], the portfolio choice [11,12], the computer memory [13], the allocation of resources [14], energy minimization [15,16], cargo load problem [17][18][19], real estate property maintenance optimization [20], the main budget [21] and blanking problem [7]. Many real-world optimization problems are similar to 0-1 knapsack problem, therefore, exploring approaches to e ectively solve 0-1 knapsack problem is important and it can o er new methods for some complex engineering optimization problems.…”

Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Techniques for Improvement Sustainability Engineering Processes

“…Authors from Poland contributed four papers, but only to a national cooperation [20][21][22][23]. Researchers from Serbia have published 15 papers: three without international cooperation [24][25][26], four with authors from Bosnia and Herzegovina [27][28][29][30], three with authors from India [31][32][33], mentioned [6,7,11,19], India-Finland-Serbia [34]. Authors from India have published seven papers.…”