Tactical management of rail freight transportation services: Evaluation of yard performance

In this paper, a two-step approach for the evaluation of rail freight yard performance at a tactical management level, that could plausibly be used at both annual and weekly planning levels, is presented and discussed. The suggested approach involves analytical modelling with G/G/m queues and event-based simulations with SIMUL8 which is implemented for the purposes of a rail freight operator. Interesting concepts and important relations involving traffic rules, yard capacity and utilization rates are demonstrated based on a case study of CP Carga, the Portuguese rail freight operator.