Project – Rail Cargo Planner implementation at leading Rail Operator

Written by: Delaja Post 
DELMIA Quintiq | 2 mins read 

RCP implementation for leading European railway operator

A leading European railway operator, which focuses on several areas such as cargo transportation on domestic and international routes, wagon rental, freight forwarding, and rolling stock repair considered Rail Cargo Planning (RCP). Their core business is transporting freight according to the clients’ needs from West to East Europe and Asia. For them, Ab Ovo’s standardized Rail Cargo Planning (RCP) solution was a perfect fit. Based on the customer’s KPIs, it provides end-to-end planning and optimization of trains, paths, fleet, crew, and transport orders.

 

The planning puzzle

  • The customer’s planning puzzle consists primarily of five areas:
    • Locomotive planning: Assigning locomotives to trains while minimizing the number of locomotives and empty moves.
    • Driver planning: Divided into shift planning and roster planning while minimizing the number of drivers.
    • Order planning: Allocating orders to trains while minimizing the distance and shunting.
    • Empty wagon planning: Focuses on which empty wagon moves are necessary to maintain the empty wagon stock over their network.
    • Yard planning: Covers decisions such as local driver and ground operator shift planning, shunting loc allocation, parking and refueling.
  • Puzzle size: Around 400 drivers, 350 ground operators, and 200 locomotives.
  • Planning horizon: Long-term (1 year ahead), short-term (4 to 6 weeks ahead) and day of ops (1 to 3 days ahead.)
"Like our name says, we are a partner ‘from the beginning till the end’, from implementation to trainings till post go-live support."

Ab Ovo as an implementation partner

Ab Ovo has worked with the organization to integrate the customer’s puzzle into RCP, extend additional interfaces to fully integrate its IT landscape, and launch the first go live of the different stages. Ab Ovo was also enlisted as a support partner to the customer, providing user training, data collection, and solution configuration.

Important factors within this project

  • Ab Ovo’s own standardized Rail Cargo Planning (RCP) solution
  • Optimized planning of locomotives, drivers, yards, orders, and empty wagons.
  • An implementation and support partner from the beginning till the end
  • Flexible optimizer that can be tailored based on the customer’s KPIs
  • An implementation partner that is committed to their customer

The above list does not limit us. Let us know if you want to get in touch and chat about what our team can do for your business to create value.

"Ab Ovo is a Platinum DELMIA Quintiq partner with 120+ specialized employees with a global customer footprint."