In late April, TRAIN faculty and students traveled to Belgrade, Serbia for RailBelgrade 2023, the 10th International Conference on Railway Operations Modelling and Analysis (ICROMA). Prof. Dick was honored to deliver a lecture on yard design and capacity as part of the pre-conference Mini Course and also chair one of the conference sessions.
Jiaxi Zhao presented “Predicting and Measuring Service Disruption Recovery Time in Railway Gravity Hump Classification Yards”. This paper was selected to receive a “Top Ten Best Papers of RailBelgrade 2023” award!
Steven Shi presented a poster entitled “Simplified Train Consist Planner to Drive Simulations of Alternative Energy Locomotive Deployment Strategies to Lower the Carbon Emissions of Freight Rail Transportation” on his work to develop a streamlined train planner to support modeling alternative energy locomotive deployment strategies under our ARPA-E project.
Matt Parkes presented his paper co-authored with Geordie Roscoe on “Evaluating the Potential for Platoons of Self-Propelled Autonomous Railcars (SPARCs) to Provide Short-Haul Intermodal Service
on Low-Density Rail Corridors”. This paper describes our ongoing corridor simulation work for Parallel Systems to model their battery-powered vehicles designed to transport shipping container by rail.
We were also excited to see Niloofar Minbashi from KTH Swedish Royal Institute of Technology present “Application of Simulation-assisted Machine Learning for Yard Departure Prediction”, summarizing our collaborative work on this topic.
Finally, the conference concluded with a visit to the rail freight terminal outside Belgrade where the group viewed train operations at the container and freight transload facility!
