Union Pacific Railroad

Union Pacific Corporation (NYSE:UNP) is one of America's leading transportation companies. Its Railroad is the largest railroad in North America, covering 23 states across two-thirds of the United States. UP is the only railroad to serve all six major gateways to Mexico and also interchanges traffic with the Canadian rail systems. The railroad has one of the most diversified commodity mixes in the industry, including chemicals, coal, food and food products, forest products, grain and grain products, intermodal, metals and minerals and automobiles and parts.

Generating new Railroad Blocking Ideas for the Union Pacific Railroad

Innovative Scheduling partnered with Multi-Modal (now Mercer Management) to re-engineer the Union Pacific’s Service Design using our IRBO model. Several of our recommendations were included in UP’s new “Unified Plan”. According to the Union Pacific’s 10K report to the SEC, “ . . . the fluidity and efficiency of our transportation network improved substantially, which allowed us to handle record volume levels. . . With ongoing enhancements to our Unified Plan and implementation of terminal processing initiatives, productivity improved as demonstrated by 5% lower average terminal dwell time, a 4% improvement in car utilization and a 1% increase in average train speed. . . . .We also expanded capacity and continued to use industrial engineering techniques to further improve network fluidity, ease capacity constraints and improve asset utilization.”

Proving the Value of Optimal Train Schedule Design to the Union Pacific

We are currently working with UP experts to apply our Innovative Train Scheduling Optimizer (ITSO) to their expansive network. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the value of the model in a proof-of-concept evaluation by developing a comprehensive set of case studies. We will generate model results that can be used to identify opportunities for improving the company’s network train schedule plan. Our recommendations should achieve significant cost reductions and service improvements over the current manually generated plans. The case studies include an analysis of train speeds, a clean sheet development exercise, a set of incremental changes to existing train schedules, a sensitivity analysis on terminal processing times and a sensitivity analysis on train length restrictions. Furthermore, UP hopes to use ITSO to increase train size and reduce the number of planned, intermediate work events that tend to slow operations and create network congestion.

Applying the Innovative Locomotive Planning Optimizer to Resource Planning Problems at the Union Pacific Railroad

UP has over 8500 locomotives, representing over $6 billion in asset value. UP invests over $350 million each year to acquire new locomotives. It is vital to optimally deploy the locomotive fleet to maximize freight carrying capacity and to ensure trains run on-time. There is a lot of leverage in improving the productivity of the asset, but even more leverage in improving the performance of the overall network. Over the years, large rail networks have experienced temporal locomotive shortages that cause congestion. Union Pacific has begun a journey with Innovative Scheduling to develop and implement a comprehensive decision support system that they believe will dramatically improve their locomotive planning capability.
We are currently using our ILPO model to create a planned base case, a base case using historical run times and to present a number of sensitivity analyses on light engine moves, unit costs, fleet size and standard consists. UP is particularly interested in understanding the costs and benefits of operating a system wide locomotive plan versus segregating their locomotives into several, smaller sub-networks.