Locomotive assignment on railway corridor: Problem and algorithms

We consider how to assign locomotives to satisfy the freight demand on the railway corridor. By learning, we find that locomotive assignment on the corridor can be transformed into a combinatorial optimization problem, namely Minimum Path Partition Problem. This problem can be seen as a sub-problem of the Minimum Path Factor Problem. Two methods are presented for solving the Minimum Path Partition Problem: the first method, based on the approach to the Minimum Path Factor Problem, runs in time [Formula: see text]; the second method, taking advantage of the characteristics of the time-space network, is faster, and its running time is [Formula: see text], where [Formula: see text] is the number of vertices in the time-space network of demand.