Arising from a practical problem in European rail freight transport we present a heuristic solution approach that is based on a new generalized mixed integer problem formulation for the Locomotive Assignment Problem. A main focus is on the one hand on the (dis-)connecting processes between cars and locomotives and on the other hand on combining two or more locomotives, i.e., the process of building and busting consists (combination of locomotives). Furthermore, regional limitations for running certain types of locomotives and technical conditions for combining locomotives are taken into account. A generalized solution framework is developed that allows a gradual restricting of the solution space and enables an analysis and comparison of different solution procedures. Testing these for a real-world network as well as several newly generated instances shows that the framework outperforms previous approaches in the literature. Thus a suitable solution method for an application in practice is presented.

由于欧洲铁路货运中的一个实际问题，我们提出了一种启发式解决方案方法，该方法基于针对机车分配问题的新的广义混合整数问题公式。一个主要的重点是一方面在汽车和机车之间的（断开）连接过程，另一方面在结合两个或更多机车的过程上，即建造和破坏的过程（机车的组合）。此外，考虑了运行某些类型的机车的区域限制和组合机车的技术条件。开发了一种通用的解决方案框架，该框架允许逐步限制解决方案空间，并可以分析和比较不同的解决方案过程。对现实网络以及几个新生成的实例进行测试表明，该框架优于文献中的先前方法。因此，提出了一种适合实际应用的解决方法。