Increasing the Capacity of Shunting Yards Within the Current Infrastructure: A Computational Perspective

Abstract

With a dense infrastructure and limited space, the opportunities for increasing the capacity of the railway network in the Netherlands are limited. One of the bottlenecks is optimally using the available space around stations and in shunting yards. Many details must be considered, increasing the complexity of the problem. Human planners can benefit from computational support to ensure efficient use of the infrastructure. We introduce a framework for positioning previous research in terms of abstractions and highlight a promising future direction: the development of a new approach that combines different methods and uses the relations between the abstractions to create more efficient solutions.