A GAME-THEORETIC NETWORK EQUILIBRIUM SOLUTION APPROACH FOR THE RAILROAD FREIGHT CAR MANAGEMENT PROBLEM

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.