In the country’s transport system, rail transport occupies a leading place in the development of the Russian economy. The most important role in the strategy for the development of railway transport in Russia belongs to the process of informatization, which provides the necessary and reliable information to all areas of management related to the transportation of goods and passengers. For fundamental scientific, technical and organizational problems solvation, the Concept and Program of Informatization of Railway Transport have been developed.
In the context of large-scale reforms in railway transport informatization is carried out using information technologies, the most important elements of which are models, methods and algorithms for making control decisions.
The problem of the development of the transport complex of Russia cannot be solved without the creation and improvement of a high-tech complex of interrelated formal models, applied methods and effective decision-making algorithms in the management of the transportation process.
An analysis of the current conditions for the functioning of railway transport shows that there are often problems for which the previously developed methodological tool turned out to be poorly adapted and the creation of a new generation of models and methods for making the right management decisions is required. The developed methods and models, on the one hand, should take into account the new functional requirements for information and control systems in railway transport, on the other hand, modern trends in the construction of these models, methods and algorithms.
The implementation of control decisions made on the basis of inadequate models and methods can lead to serious consequences, and the management problem that has arisen cannot be solved, even with a large amount of information, until an adequate model, method or algorithm is developed.
Today, in railway transport, there is a significant gap between the enormous capabilities of existing computers and the machine algorithms used for control decisions. There is a need for an early transition from the information to the control mode of transport management, the development of fundamentally new, more adequate and effective models, methods and algorithms to improve the objectivity, quality and timeliness of management decisions.
A special problem associated with the adaptation of the control system to the changed conditions and requiring a mandatory solution in the development of a new generation of methods and models is the issues of improving the structure of the control system. An effective approach to its solution, which makes it possible to better adapt to transportation management and significantly reduce the complexity of management, is the development of multi-level management structures through the optimal decomposition of the transport network into landfills. Of particular relevance is the problem of transition to polygon transportation management technologies. This technology is formed on the basis of scientific and technological achievements and provides for new solutions – the transition from regional management principles to the planning and organization of train traffic on the landfill network. Based on the fact that bulk cargo is mainly formed by enterprises of the Ural-Siberian region, their networks distinguish two enlarged landfills. This is the Eastern polygon, includes the Baikal-Amur Mainline and the Trans-Siberian Railway, and the Western, where the main cargo flows are concentrated in the direction of the North-West, the center and the South of the country.
Today, these areas account for more than 80% of the network cargo turnover with their total length of 28 thousand km, which is a third of the operational length of the network.
The key principle of the landfill is the technology and infrastructure parameters unification and the existing contradictions elimination at the borders. It is this approach that will allow you to achieve the maximum effect, including from investments.
A significant problem is the adequate models and methods development of discrete combinatorial optimization, since in the context of economic reforms, the role of discrete problems of managing transport systems increases. The importance of this problem is explained by the strengthening of the quality requirements and efficiency of solving those numerous control problems that are most consistent with the mathematics of discrete sets or sets that change at discrete moments of time.
The main problem of solving discrete control problems is exacerbated by four additional problems. Firstly, many of the problems under consideration are multi-criteria, which significantly complicates the search for the optimal solution, since it requires the determination of some compromise result, which in the general case is not optimal for any criterion. Secondly, it is necessary to take into account the significantly positive nature of a number of parameters of the management tasks to be solved, which will make it possible to build adequate models and methods that take into account the real capabilities of various elements of the transport network for the passage and processing of wagons and trains. Thirdly, the variable conditions of the network required the development of adequate dynamic models that take into account the non-stationary nature of the discrete control problems to be solved. Fourthly, the complexity of the ongoing reforms, the difficulty of identifying the main parameters of new management tasks and other reasons lead to the need to develop control decisions based on inaccurate, approximate and so-called «fuzzy» initial data, for which it is enough just to indicate their possible values relative to a certain interval of reliability.
The proposed book attempts to systematize the solutions to the above management problems based on the creation of appropriate models, methods and algorithms, which are an important part of promising information technologies that require priority implementation in railway transport and transport systems.
The authors hope that the book will help developers and students specializing in the field of transportation process management based on information technology to get acquainted with the methods of building and implementing models and methods of management in railway transport.
