A case paper review to explain how Decision Analysis Methodologies were applied to resolve transportation via a railway dis

A case paper review to explain how Decision Analysis Methodologies were applied to resolve transportation via a railway distribution network.

Incorporated in 1881, Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) was North Americas first transcontinental railway. CPR transports rail freight over a 14,000-mile network extending from Montreal to Vancouver and throughout the U.S. Northwest and Midwest. Alliances with other carriers extend CPRs market reach into the major business centers of Mexico as well.

This is a seminal research article was written in 2004. So clearly, CPR is a much larger frim today.

By the time this article was written, CPR receives over 7,000 new shipments every day from its customers going to destinations across North America and for export. It must route and ship these shipments in railcars over the network of track, where a railcar may be switched a number of times from one locomotive engine to another before reaching its destination. CPR must coordinate the shipments with its operational plans for 1,600 locomotives, 6500 railcars, over 5000 train crewmembers, and 250 train yards.

CPR management turned to a consulting firm specializing in decision science modeling, MultiModal Applied Systems, to work with CPR employees, in developing a decision analysis approach to this problem. In helping to handle CPR problem, MultiModal Applied Systems developed and used a variety of Decision Analysis techniques and models to create a new operational strategy. However, the foundation of the approach was to represent the flow of blocks of railcars as flow through a network where each node corresponds to both a location and a point in time. This representation then enable the application of network optimization techniques. For example, numerous shortest path problems are solved each day as part of the overall approach.

As you read the article, I hope you will conclude that with the help of MultiModal Applied Systems, CPR now provides its customers with a reliable delivery times and has received many awards for its improvement in service.

Source of the article is as follow:

14. Ireland, R. Case, J. Fallis, C. van dyke, J. Kuehn, and M. Meketon, The Canadian Pacific Railway Transforms Operations by using Models to Develop its Operating Plans, Interfaces 34, No. 1 (January February 2004), pp. 5 -14.

Please read, conduct research to find additional research materials on transportation networks, and related supply chain delivery problems. Discuss this and any relevant papers you find from research, discuss your findings with the members of your group and write an essay to answer the following questions.

1. Explain the non-financial benefits that were derived from this study.