An Efficient Real-Time Railway Container Yard Management Method Based on Partial Decoupling

Sea-rail intermodal transportation is an essential infrastructure in global supply chains nowadays. Since the yard is the interface between sea and land, optimizing the transportation process in yards is of significant interest for increasing transportation efficiency. However, the yard management problem usually suffers from the large state space and cannot be solved effectively. We consider this important problem from a decomposition perspective, focusing on real-time scheduling in railway container yards, and make the following contributions. We show the partial decomposition property of the yard management problem. This property establishes the equivalence between joint optimization of yard components and independent optimization of each component under mild assumptions, achieving optimality and effectiveness simultaneously. Utilizing this property, we further simplify each subproblem while preserving the optima, and develop algorithms for each simplified subproblem. Numerical experiments demonstrate the performance of proposed algorithms and the contribution of optimizing each subproblem from various perspectives.