Ea. Adamidou et al., A GAME-THEORETIC NETWORK EQUILIBRIUM SOLUTION APPROACH FOR THE RAILROAD FREIGHT CAR MANAGEMENT PROBLEM, Transportation research. Part B: methodological, 27(3), 1993, pp. 237-252
Citations number
47
Categorie Soggetti
Transportation,"Operatione Research & Management Science","Engineering, Civil
The paper presents the development and solution procedures of a mathem
atical model of the management of a fleet of cars shared by autonomous
profit maximizing managers faced with time-varying demands requiring
shared service responsibility. Motivation for the model development ar
ises from the freight car management problem, in which many railroads
independently manage an interchangeable fleet of cars that serve custo
mers with time-dependent origin-destination patterns; this often requi
res the cooperative service of more than one railroad. The problem is
formulated as an N-person, noncooperative game played on a temporal-sp
atial network. An iterative sequential procedure is developed for whic
h car management decisions for each railroad over a specified time hor
izon are based on the previously calculated optimized decisions of caf
management decisions for all other railroads. Several realistic test
case problems are reported that exhibit rapid convergence to an equili
brium solution. It is proposed that this modeling procedure be used as
a basis for evaluating (and possibly generating optimal) interrailroa
d agreements for the exchange of empty freight cars.