BNSF Railway

Extending over 32,000 route miles, BNSF Railway is the world’s largest intermodal carrier. BNSF Railway understands the importance of quality, speed and reliability in serving its customers and demands the same performance from BNSF vendors. We are gratified that BNSF has elected to work with us in developing the next generation of train scheduling and railroad blocking decision support tools. With over 220,000 frieght cars and 6,300 locomotives travellling through its network everyday, BNSF is emphasizing the use of Operations Research techniques to increase capacity utilization, improve service and increase efficiency of its operations.

In 2005, BNSF transported more than 900,000 carloads of agricultural commodities, nearly half of which were corn and wheat movements. BNSF hauls enough grain to supply 900 million people with a year’s supply of bread. In 2005, more than 5 million intermodal shipments (truck trailers or containers) were transported on BNSF’s rail lines instead of the nation’s congested highways. This is equivalent to a truck trailer or container being loaded onto a BNSF intermodal train every 6 seconds. More than 10 percent of the electricity produced in the United States is generated from the coal hauled by BNSF. Most of the coal BNSF hauls comes from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana where the coal deposit is 60 percent lower in sulfur than most other U.S. coal sources.

Deploying the Innovative Railroad Blocking Optimizer at BNSF Railway

Innovative Scheduling extensively used its railroad blocking optimizer to develop blocking plan for BNSF Railway’s merchandise network. We showed that by changing only 1% of the blocks, the system-wide intermediate handling could be reduced by 2%-3% potentially worth millions of dollars in benefits. As a result of this study, BNSF has licensed our IRBO software and has installed it as part of their day-to-day business process. BNSF Service Design is routinely using IRBO for several planning and strategic studies. As part of the on-site deployment, we developed several customized enhancements to our standard IRBO software to meet BNSF’s specific needs. Learn more …

Developing the Innovative Train Scheduling Optimizer Algorithms with BNSF Railway

BNSF Railway funded Innovative Scheduling research grants to build optimization engines to generate a clean-slate or an incremental train schedule plan. BNSF supplemented funding from the National Science Foundation, enabling us to build a decision support system for the railroad industry’s most challenging optimization problem. Computational results from ITSO show that the use of this software will reduce a major railroad’s operating costs for cars, locomotives, and crew by at least 5%, with dollar savings in tens of millions of dollars annually. Learn more …