INFORMS-RASIG: student problem-solving at its best

Railway Age, June, 2007

In the May issue (p. 24), Railway Age addressed the industry's need to attract and retain new talent. At the academic level, one of the more useful initiatives is the international student paper competition sponsored by INFORMS-RASIG (Institute for Operations Research and Management Science-Rail Applications Special Interest Group). While the material tends to lean toward the theoretical, it nevertheless indicates that there is knowledge and interest out there to be tapped. The winning entries for the past two years cover a broad range of railway operational and technical challenges:

* First place, 2006: "Spatial Scheduling and Resource Selection Problem: Modeling, Algorithm, and Application in the Production Gang Scheduling for Railway Maintenance Operations," by Gang Li, The University of Texas at Austin. This paper addressed the problem of assigning and routing resources to jobs and sequencing the jobs to minimize the total cost for deploying and re-positioning resources. The model has been helping a Class I "save millions of dollars each year and significantly improve the quality of maintenance operations."

* Second place, 2006: "Modeling reordering and local rerouting strategies to solve train conflicts during rail operations," by Andrea D'Ariano, Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences Transport and Planning Department, The Netherlands. Experiments on the Dutch railway network show that an algorithm to manage real-time timetable perturbations and blocked tracks improves solutions provided by practical dispatching rules.

* Honorable mention, 2006: "Solving Real Life Locomotive and Fuel Service Problems," by Balachandran Vaidyanathan, University of Florida, Gainesville. Fueling feasibility requires that every locomotive visit a service location at least once for every 1,800 miles of travel.

2005 INFORMS-RASIG student paper competition winners included "Decreasing the Passenger Waiting times for IC Networks of Belgian Railways," by Pieter Vansteenwegen, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium (first place).