An event-triggered receding-horizon scheme for planning rail operations in maritime terminals

This paper proposes a planning approach to optimize railway operations in seaport terminals by adopting a queue-based discrete-time model of the considered system. First, a mixed-integer linear mathematical programming problem is defined in order to optimize the timing of import trains and the use of the handling resources devoted to rail port operations. Second, in order to deal with unexpected situations or uncertainty in estimating some data necessary to the planning, an event-triggered receding-horizon planning approach is proposed, in which the finite horizon optimization problem is solved whenever a critical event happens or the real values of some problem data significantly differ fromthe predicted ones. Both these planning approaches are tested on data referred to a real terminal and deeply discussed in this paper.