The Scheduling of Rail at Union Pacific Railroad

Abstract

The Union Pacific Railroad (UPRR) has over 3 1,000 miles of track covering a 24 state region. Planning and scheduling the production, packaging, delivery, and pickup of rail, involved in the maintenance of this network, is a very complex task. Manually scheduling only a subset of the resources required has historically taken several days to accomplish. Moreover, the inability to fully schedule all resources can lead to inefficient resource utilization. This paper describes the Rail Train Scheduler (RTS), designed and developed to capture the expertise of the UPRR scheduler, generate production schedules of all the resources involved, and provide a decision support tool for determining the best mix of resources required. RTS is an expert system that uses constraint satisfaction and domain specific heuristics to produce good, low cost schedules. It has been deployed since January, 1996. UPRR anticipates a savings of about $500,000 per year from the use of RTS. ntroduction This paper describes a scheduling application, the Rail Train Scheduler (RTS), designed and developed for Union Pacific Railroad (UPRR). The primary motivation for developing the application was to solve a major operational problem relating to the allocation of resources required to provide rail to Union Pacific track construction and repair projects. The current manual process schedules some of the resources (weld plant capacity and rail material) but just assumes adequate availability of the necessary rail handling equipment. It also focuses on the delivery of rail while generally ignoring the pickup of used rail for re-use.