Process improvement techniques for railroad classification yards
Much of the world's freight is transported by rail and in the United States the rail system is mostly used for this purpose. Railroads operate most efficiently by consolidating many individual railcars into trains. This results in many railcars that need to be classified at almost every terminal yard. The process that railcars go through at the yard is very time consuming and delays can be a major problem. This project consisted of both quantitative and qualitative research. Data was analyzed from various rail yards, field visits, and interviews with experts in the field. Investigation was performed on how to improve the rail yard process with a focus on the relationship between railcar length and capacity, variability in yard processes, and identification of the bottleneck process. By using the exact length of railcars entering the yard, a more correct measurement of capacity can be obtained. Understanding variation is important because the process that has the highest coefficient of variance will have the greatest chance of delay. The bottleneck in the rail yard operation is the pull-down process.
School:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Department:
Civil Engineering
Research Advisor:
Chris Barkan
Department of Research Advisor:
Civil and Environmental Engineering
Year of Publication:
2005