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Abstract
This paper investigates dynamic railcar planning in railroad classification yards. The plan decides the assignment of railcars from inbound trains to outbound trains under various size limitations of outbound trains and allows dynamic sequencing of inbound train classification and outbound train assembly. A mixed-integer program is presented for the problem along with a heuristic algorithm based on the harmony search strategy. The numerical results based on both a real-world case and randomly created instances show that dynamic sequencing can reduce total dwell time compared to static sequencing, especially when more trains are classified at a yard. However, the savings on average dwell time for each railcar become smaller when the traffic volume goes up. Once the volume through a yard is close to its capacity, the dwell time per rail car goes up very quickly and the benefit of dynamic sequencing diminishes. It implies that the benefit of dynamic sequencing is more significant for yards with lower traffic volume.