The Customer

The customer is a major bulk logistics rail operator serving the New South Wales and Victorian agricultural supply chain.

The Challenges

The customer needed a more efficient way to schedule their trains across its network, from loading trains at grain silos and transporting bulk amounts of grain over hundreds of kilometres of rail network to unloading at domestic mills and terminals for export.

This rail value chain is large, complex and involves many stakeholders. The customer’s prime constraint is developing a schedule modelling constraints on network access caused by high volumes of rail traffic on regional, coastal, and metro lines owned and operated by multiple entities.

In addition to the limited track availability, many load and unload sites only allow access to rail services within narrow time windows. Rail plans must align to schedules provided by domestic and export terminals and servicing load points during daylight hours for safety purposes. Accounting for the availability of all stakeholders within a value chain while also producing an optimal rail plan presents a challenging problem to solve.

Before engaging Polymathian, the customer’s spreadsheet-based planning system was time-consuming and inflexible. In a dynamic environment where network availability is regularly updated, re-planning often continues until the plan is released. Rudimentary validation methods hinder the ability of planners to reschedule or evaluate other options.