부산대학교 도서관

This paper considers a load planning problem for a high-speed train called CTX (Cargo Transit eXpress), whose speed is up to 300 km/h. In the problem, a CTX train visits a sequence of predetermined stations and loads and unloads small containers called unit load device (ULD) from the stations. A CTX train has a given number of cars and each of which has available given positions for ULDs. A set of ULDs that are transported by the train is given and each of which has weight and origin and destination stations. Since the train moves fast, the weight balance among the cars and within each car of the train is critical for safety. Furthermore, since the train traverses multiple stations, the weight balance should be kept among all the legs between stations. The problem is to assign ULDs to positions of cars with consideration of load balancing and multiple stations. Thus, this problem is a multi-leg load planning problem, which has not been studied much. Because the problem is NP-hard, a heuristic algorithm is proposed. The computational results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.