Analysis and evaluation of double-ended flat-shunted yard performance employing two yard crews

The yards are facilities that reassemble inbound freight train cars into outbound freight trains. These facilities play an essential role for providing the freight transportation service by rail, however, they are nonrevenue producing elements for the railway freight companies and therefore keeping them unutilized is not acceptable. In this paper, a double-ended flat-shunted yard has been studied by discrete-event-based simulations. The results obtained demonstrate significantly low utilization levels of the subsystems of this yard. Therefore, a possible reduction of floating resources is investigated.