The Customer

The customer is an owner-operator of track for one of the world’s largest interconnected coal rail networks, linking mine producers with three major ports. The customer wants to ensure their capital investment, the track infrastructure, is being used to capacity by maximising the volume of coal railed over the network each week.

The Challenges

As the track owner, our customer contracts use of the network to haulage providers for three separately planned but interconnected coal chains, each with their own operational constraints. With each provider submitting their weekly usage plans independently of each other and with so many different scheduling inputs to consider (i.e., number of available trains, production schedules, contractual access obligations, crew scheduling and track maintenance or repairs), made it impossible for the customer to know if the plans received were maximising network capacity. Additionally, it was the customer’s responsibility to combine the schedules, manage any conflicts based on contractual obligations, and then issue the final schedule to each stakeholder without revealing other stakeholder’s commercial information.

Key Challenges

• Complex manual planning and scheduling process due to the extensive number of data inputs from each network stakeholder.
• The three separate but interconnected coal chains had operational constraints that must be considered during the planning and scheduling process.
• Generating a plan that maximised the amount of coal hauled over the network each week while factoring in the above considerations.

The Solution

After implementing the RACE Planning module, the customer now produces mathematically optimised schedules for their network stakeholders that considers all input variables, which ultimately ensures the network is operating at capacity on any given week.

Additionally, they can now plan network maintenance at optimal times, resulting in minimal disruption to throughput. The confidence provided by using a global optimisation tool gives the above-rail stakeholders the certainty needed to confidently contract larger orders, further improving network efficiencies.

Solution Highlights

• Deployed the planning module of RACE to solve inbound rail planning and scheduling problems.
• Stakeholders demand data is input into RACE by the customer, who can then solve the complex scheduling problem using industrial mathematics.
• The resulting integrated plan is issued to the coal chain stakeholders to incorporate into their business processes/systems.