The chapter deals with the wagon-load freight transport. This kind of transport used to be the core business of railways during the last century, while in last decades it began to see its market share reduced in favor of other transport typologies (e.g. intermodal transport). Today wagon-load transport seems no longer economically viable and the smaller and medium volumes used majorly road vehicles and sometimes combined transport.
This paper describes the state of advancement achieved in the OptiYard research project in the use of optimisation algorithms in interaction with microsimulation of the rail-yard and surrounding network towards realtime yard management and communication with the network. Two case studies, a hump marshalling yard (mainly Single Wagon Load traffic) and a flat shunting yard (mainly intermodal traffic), were represented with state-of-the art microsimulation models, combined with innovative optimisation algorithms. Some specialistic information on the nature of the models is provided.
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