Reduction of Transportation Costs for Delivering of Welded Rail Segments by Intermediate Storages

Rail lashes are an important resource for the construction and repair of the track, the need for which is constantly growing. The rail lashes must be delivered to the work sites in a timely manner. Since work sites or highway construction sites do not have intermediate storage facilities for rail weaves, the logistics chain for providing track work resources often runs with delays that directly affect the timing of work and transportation costs. Objective: to reduce transportation costs by introducing intermediate warehouses of rail weaves. Methods: methods of graph theory are used. The problem of searching for p-medians on a weighted graph representing a transport network is solved. The Floyd — Warshall algorithm was used to find optimal locations for warehouses. Results: the analysis of the logistic supply chain of rail weaves for track work was performed, the main non-deliveries of the existing system were identified and analyzed. A method for optimizing the logistics chain is proposed and justified by introducing rail weaves into the chain of intermediate warehouses. Practical significance: the use of intermediate warehouses will reduce transportation costs, reduce the duration of the delivery of lashes to the places of track work and increase the uniformity of loading of rail welding enterprises.