Project Summary
UK freight planners often rely on manual spreadsheet processes.
They can spend weeks each quarter converting commercial
demand into operational train plans while managing hundreds of
variables. These include locomotive types, terminal operating
windows, wagon compatibility, and customer cut-off times – a
slow, labour-intensive approach that leaves capacity and revenue
untapped. This project will develop an automated train planning
system combining two core modules: a constraint satisfaction
solver (a systematic algorithm that finds solutions meeting all
operational requirements simultaneously) that rapidly generates
feasible train plans, and an AI-based optimiser that fine-tunes
these plans to maximise asset utilisation while minimising driver
hours and operational costs. By automating this critical planning
process and reducing planning time from weeks to hours, the tool
will make rail freight more competitive, enabling better capacity
utilisation and supporting the modal shift toward cleaner, higher capacity r
