Freight Train Timetable Optimization Of The Western Line Of Ghana Railway System

The freight operations in Ghana Railway have experienced a sharp decline in operations and efficiency as annual freight tonnage has dropped 1,867,040 tons in 2003 to 566,180 tons in 2019.Previous investigations conducted by the company and other researchers have shown that this shortfall may be attributed to the poor state of infrastructure,inadequate rolling stock,inefficient traffic operations and negligence on the part of operation staff.Therefore,it is important to conduct a study to find out how the optimization of the train timetable will have on the overall efficiency of operations.This paper therefore seeks to investigate the causes of delays which lead to increased travelling times of trains,optimize the current timetable and assess its effect of the travelling times of trains and the capacity of the railway network.This paper presents a MILP(Mixed Integer Linear Programming)model to solve the timetabling problem.The blocking time approach is employed to estimate the headway times of trains and the International Union of Railways(UIC)406 compression method is used to determine the effect of the optimized timetable on the capacity consumption of the line.The proposed methodology is applied on a case study of the western line of Ghana Railway and the results showed the optimized time table produced a reduced total travel time of trains as compared to the initial timetable.The results further showed that the optimized timetable has a lower capacity consumption of the line as compared to the initial timetable using the same number and type of trains in both cases...