Research Project Essay

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NATIONAL UNIVERSITYOFSCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY FACULTY OF APPLIED SCIENCES DEPARTMENT OF APPLIED MATHEMATICS AND OPERATIONS RESEARCH AND STATISTICS PROJECT TITLE LOCOMOTIVE SCHEDULING IN FREIGHT TRANSPORT AT MPOPOMA TRAIN STATION IN BULAWAYO FOR THE SOUTHERN REGION. Name : Siphosenkosi Dube Swene Student Registration Number : N0061902D Programme : Operations Research and Statistics Supervisor : Mr. A. Masache Date of Submission : 11 June 2010 A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of BSc Honours Degree in Operations Research and Statistics in the Faculty of Applied Sciences ABSTRACT In this study, the results of a locomotive scheduling problem faced by National Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ) are presented. The study is in part inspired by similar optimization problems in public transports. The study focuses on the planning version of the locomotive scheduling problem (LSM), where there are multiple types of locomotives and a decision is made as to which set of locomotives is to be assigned to each train. The goal is to develop excellent plans along a number of dimensions. An integrated model that determines the set of active and deadheaded locomotives for each train and light travelling locomotives is presented. An important feature of the model is that consist-bustings is explicitly considered. A mixed integer programming (IP) formulation of the problem that contains about 20 integer variables and 32 constraints is given. Using LINGO 10, a solution technique was developed to solve this problem within 2 minutes of computation time. When the solution was compared with the existing scenario at NRZ, savings of close to 40 locomotives were realized, which translates into savings of over ten million dollars annually. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Firstly I would like to thank God for everything He has done for me. I

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