Two-stage hierarchical decision-making strategy for railway transportation freight stowage based on cooperative embedding optimization

The freight stowage process in railway transportation involves transferring freights stacked within the freight hold onto the railcar, and subsequently transporting them to various destinations. The efficiency of this process directly affects the transportation distance of freight stowage and the economic benefits of the enterprise. However, due to the complexity of the railway transportation stowage problem and the numerous optimization variables that must be considered, it is difficult for freight stowage workers to develop a better freight stowage plan in a short time, while the decision-making efficiency is crucial for the enterprise. Therefore, this paper proposes a two-stage hierarchical decision-making strategy for railway transportation freight stowage based on cooperative embedding optimization. First, an intelligent optimization algorithm is used to find the optimal solution for each railcar destination arrangement. Then, based on the designed railcar destination assignment, the freight stowage scheme is obtained according to the principle of minimum transportation distance. To synergistically consider the railcar destination sequence setting and the freight stowage scheme, the results of freight stowage are introduced into the fitness function of the first optimization step to improve the overall performance of the decision optimization scheme. Simulation experiments based on the data from a real-world enterprise show that the proposed strategy provides an effective decision-making method for improving the economic efficiency of the enterprise.