Constructive heuristics for the problem of shunting scheduling for train formation and decomposition in rail yards

The planning of railway maneuvers in yards represents a complex operational problem, characterized by high combinatoriality and strong impact on logistics performance indicators, such as train downtime and asset utilization. Traditionally, these decisions are made manually, supported by the empirical knowledge of operators, which tends to generate inconsistencies and loss of efficiency in more complex operating environments. In this work, the problem of train formation and decomposition in railway yards is modeled as a maneuver sequencing problem, formulated as the search for the shortest path in a state tree, in which each state represents a configuration of the yard and each transition corresponds to a maneuver with an associated cost. Due to the exponential growth of the search space, a constructive heuristic is proposed that takes into account physical and operational constraints and characteristics of the railway trains, aiming to reduce the total execution time of the maneuvers.