COST-MINIMIZING TRAIN PATH MANAGEMENT: CURRENT AND PROPOSED CALCULATION METHOD
Affiliations
- 1Infrastructure of Serbian Railways, Belgrade, Serbia, nemanja.tosic@srbrail.rs
- 2University of Belgrade, Faculty of Transport and Traffic Engineering, Belgrade, Serbia, p.jovanovic@sf.bg.ac.rs
- 3University of Belgrade, Faculty of Transport and Traffic Engineering, Belgrade, Serbia, d.macura@sf.bg.ac.rs
Abstract
Serbian railway access charges for unused reserved capacity are being reformed. This paper develops a cost-minimization model for freight operators selecting train paths under both current (train-count-based) and proposed (train-km-based) penalty calculation method. Three long-term path types are analyzed — Regular (R), Regular on designated days (Rd), and Facultative (F) — together with ad hoc (A) path type. We derive closed-form crossover thresholds, prove that F paths dominate R paths in the deterministic scenario, and expose a systematic distortion in the current method for Rd paths: identical integer thresholds for different numbers of designated days produce disproportionate penalties. The proposed calculation method corrects this by penalizing proportionally to reserved train-km. A numerical example illustrates the magnitude of the distortion.
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Cite this paper
Nemanja TOŠIĆ, Predrag JOVANOVIĆ, Dragana MACURA. (2026). COST-MINIMIZING TRAIN PATH MANAGEMENT: CURRENT AND PROPOSED CALCULATION METHOD. RAILCON ’26 — XXII International Scientific-Expert Conference on Railways, Niš, Serbia, pp. 39–42. https://doi.org/10.46793/railcon26.039T
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