A Simulated Annealing Algorithm for Solving Railroad Blocking Problem in Freight Railroads

The Railroad Blocking problem is one of the most important problems in freight railroad areas. Solving the Railroad Blocking problem reduces the operational cost of railroads considerably and saves time in moving the freight as well. However, Railroad Blocking problem in medium and large size is not solved by any of the commercial software available in the market. This research presents an algorithm based on Simulated Annealing Algorithm for solving the railroad blocking algorithm that is able to solve the problem in a reasonable CPU time. To analyze the efficiency of the algorithm and check for the quality of solutions, experimental analyses are conducted. Two sets of small and large sized problems that were generated randomly are solved. Results on the set of problems are compared to those of solutions generated via CPLEX, one of the well-known solvers for solving both linear and mix integer programming problems.