Railway track allocation. One of the problems faced by transportation engineers is the assignment of tracks to
Question:
Railway track allocation. One of the problems faced by transportation engineers is the assignment of tracks to trains at a busy railroad station. Overused and/or underused tracks cause increases in maintenance costs and inefficient allocation of resources. The Journal of Transportation Engineering
(May 2013) investigated the optimization of track allocation at a Chinese railway station with 11 tracks. Using a new algorithm designed to minimize waiting time and bottlenecks, engineers assigned tracks to 53 trains in a single day as shown in the accompanying table. Construct a Pareto diagram for the data. Use the diagram to help the engineers determine if the allocation of tracks to trains is evenly distributed and, if not, which tracks are underutilized and overutilized.
Track Assigned Number of Trains Track #1 3 Track #2 4 Track #3 4 Track #4 4 Track #5 7 Track #6 5 Track #7 5 Track #8 7 Track #9 4 Track #10 5 Track #11 5 Total 53
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