Bus bunching is a problem faced by transport authorities around the world. SimWell Inc., an industrial engineering company supporting business decisions with simulation, used simulation modeling for transportation system analysis to figure out the best solution to solve the bus bunching problem for RTC, the public transit agency for Quebec City, Canada.
CSX is a US railroad company that operates about 21,000 route miles (34,000 km). AnyLogic allows the railroad industry users to simulate line-of-road, terminal, and yard problems. The following three projects, completed by CSX in 2014, covered a variety of tasks that were solved using AnyLogic software.
The port of Le Havre, France, needed support for construction of new multimodal terminal. The issue that required simulation was supporting containers transfer between rail trains/river barges and other existing terminals, which transferred these containers to and from sea transport.
InterBarge, a first-class waterway operator, affiliated with SCF Marine, a part of Seacor Holding Group, operates freight along the HPP Waterway (Hidrovia Parana Paraguay, located in Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, and Uruguay) on a dedicated contract carriage. The company’s challenge was to use the boat capacity free from dedicated contract commitment as a fleet, maximizing net voyage revenue.
The Port of Long Beach, California, planned to invest up to $1 billion dollars in its Pier B Yard rail facility. TranSystems, with over 25 years of experience in the transport and supply chain space, worked with the port to quantify system requirements to meet capacity goals and to gain stakeholder consensus. Modeling the rail system of the port was necessary to demonstrate to the stakeholders the required changes.
The public transportation company employed PwC Australia to develop a solution that could provide a customer-centric view of their railway infrastructure and help the company understand the current incident effects on rail network operations and how to improve the situation. PwC consultants decided to build a model of the transportation network that would simulate train movements, incidents, and customers at stations and in trains.
In public transport, bus bunching refers to a group of two or more transit vehicles (such as buses or trains), which were scheduled to be evenly spaced running along the same route, instead running in the same location at the same time. Dave Sprogis, Volunteer Software Developer, and Data Analyst in Watertown, MA, used AnyLogic to confirm his thesis that preventing "Bus Bunching" would improve the experience of public transit bus riders.
The Novoportovskoye oil and gas condensate field is located in the Yamal peninsula and owned by Gazprom Neft, the fourth largest oil producer in Russia. Oil from the field is transferred via 100km pipeline to the sea terminal at Cape Kamenny, where it is loaded into arctic cargo tanks for further transportation. The main issues in planning tanker transportation in an arctic region are the harsh ice environment and difficult sea conditions.
The KAMAZ company is the largest CIS manufacturer of heavy trucks. One of the company’s developments is the technology of a swap body container shipment — the "Kamatainer". Within the framework of the "Kamatainer" project, the company introduced a new special semi-trailer KAMAZ tractor unit that can be equipped with a dismountable multi-purpose container. At the initial stage of the project, the management of KAMAZ wanted to understand to what extent the swap body container delivery was more effective than the conventional delivery modes. This is why the company commissioned a study on the transport planning and future routes simulation.
In CIS regions, passenger railway traffic is a highly specific field. Suburban railway routes are often cut due to their unprofitability. This may have a negative impact, not only on the passengers, but also on the social and economic conditions in the regions. The Russian Central Federal District authorities faced the rail routes reduction problem. They decided to launch alternative bus routes simultaneously with the cancellation of the railway routes in order to reduce adverse impacts.