Agenda

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

16:00 - 19:00

Registration (Main Lobby of Chauncey Conference Center)

19:00 - 21:00

Welcome Cocktail Reception (Laurie House Patio)

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

08:00 - 09:00

Conference Breakfast (Adjacent to Barn Conference Center)

09:00 - 09:15

Carl Van Dyke, Director, MultiModal Systems Practice of Mercer Management Consulting: Opening Remarks (Barn Conference Room)

09:15 - 10:00

MultiModal's Strategic Direction: Carl Van Dyke (Barn Conference Room)

10:00 - 12:00

Case Presentations on Railroad Service Design (Barn Conference Center)

10:00 - 10:45

Trent Sommers, System Manager Network Optimization: "Network Planning and Support in a Changing Environment. Norfolk Southern."

An overview of Norfolk Southern's service design philosophy and systems structures. How Norfolk Southern utilizes its integrated transportation data systems to meet the four levels of Rail planning.  A description of how time horizon determines the four Rail planning levels that drive NS's systems development. A Process map view of current and future systems to meet the challenges of service disruptions and the changing Rail environment.

10:45 - 11:15

Refreshment Break (Served adjacent to the Barn Conference Room)

11:15 - 11:45

Ron Griffith, Director, Network Analysis, BNSF:  "An update on BNSF" (Barn Conference Room)

11:45 - 12:15

Stephanie Bisaillon, Senior Manager Transportation, Union Pacific: "Update on Union Pacific's Unified Plan." (Barn Conference Room) 

12:15 - 13:15

Lunch (Served in the Main Conference Dining Room)

13:15 - 13:45

Case Presentations on Railroad Service Design (Continued)

Warren Brown, Manager Transportation Planning, and Don Wetmore, Manager Resource Planning, Union Pacific Railroad: "Forecasting and Resource Planning at Union Pacific."

13:45 - 17:00

Overview of New MultiRail Tools and the Enterprise Edition (Barn Conference Room)

13:45 - 14:30

Marc Meketon, Partner, Mercer MultiModal: "New Tools for the MultiRail Planning Environment."

A review and demonstration of some of the newest additions to the MultiRail toolkit, including the Locomotive Optimization Model (LOOM), Blocking Optimization Model, Estimation of Traffic Variability, and the Traffic Density tool, which is used for line rationalization.

14:30 - 15:30

MultiModal Staff - Detailed review and demonstration of features in the new MultiRail Enterprise Edition.  The discussion and demonstration will include just-released features and some of the new functionality that is under development. (Continued after the break)

15:30 - 15:45

Refreshment Break (Served adjacent to the Barn Conference Room)

15:45 - 17:00

MultiModal Staff (Continued) - Detailed review and demonstration of features in the new MultiRail Enterprise Edition.

19:00 - 21:00

Dinner - Please join us for dinner in the Main Dining Room. Our dinner speaker will be Rodney Case, Partner, Mercer Management Consulting - "The Life of an Intercontinental Railroader"

Thursday, May 25, 2006

08:30 - 09:00

Conference Breakfast (Adjacent to Barn Conference Room)

09:00 - 09:45

Rodney Case, Partner, Mercer Management Consulting: "The power of scenario comparisons in freight planning." (Barn Conference Room) 

Railways on both sides of the Atlantic are undergoing rapid changes that are making them consider the possibilities of redeveloping the Transportation Plan to respond to these changes. The scenario modeling capability in MultiRail has provided the ability to objectively review marketing and operations proposed changes to the Plan. This session will illustrate a few rail studies in Europe and North America that were completed in MultiRail that have generated next level thinking.

09:45 - 10:45

CSX Transportation - Three part Presentation on the "Implementation of the Algorithmic Classification System (ACT)", CSX's version of MultiRail Enterprise Edition (Barn Conference Room)

Mickie Wittig , Technical Director, Application Development - "Implementation and integration of ACT with other CSX data systems." Discussion of how ACT (Algorithmic Class Tracking) fits into CSX’s vision of integrating various operating plan design toolsets. We will also discuss processes used and issues encountered during the development and validation of ACT results.

James Ralph, Director of Car Scheduling, Service Planning - "Use of ACT on a daily basis and various what-if analyses." Discussion of how CSX is using ACT to track changes in planned mileages, handlings, and yard volumes. We will also describe how CSX used ACT for improving operating plan and analyzing the impact of Katrina re-routes.

Dharma Acharya, Assistant Vice President, Operations Research, Operations Research and Planning - "Use of ACT for forecasting future volumes and resources." Description of how the O/D level commercial forecast traffic data is used in conjunction with ACT to forecast the car and train volumes over the CSX network. This process will also allow CSX to predict future demand for various resources including crews, locomotive, cars, and track.

10:45 - 11:00

Refreshment Break (Served adjacent to the Barn Conference Room)

11:00 - 11:45

Peter Kowalchuk, Design Manager, Operations Operations Research, Canadian Pacific Railway: “What's Really Happening? The Service Design Chimera - Real World in front, Real World behind, and MultiRail in the middle” (Barn Conference Room) 

Placing MultiRail in the loop from actual to design and back again

1.  Operations, Noise, Turbulence, Chaos... (Which one's the Fourth Horseman again?)

     - Lumpiness of traffic at origin, clumping in the pipe

     - Animation, thread diagrams

2.  Extinction - Bad Genes or Bad luck?

     - Darwinian fitness of a train, k-Factors, Train Mission views

3.  Happy Heisenberg - indeterminacy, Railroad style.

     - 25% of CPR traffic flows on 2 waybills or more that result in different block sequences. 

     - Terminated waybill, or the first waybill… how do we deal with estimating volumes?

4.  Cantor Dust - Getting the Plan out.

     - What is lost when the plan is rolled out?

     - Design intent, block to train rules, competition

11:45 - 12:30

Carl Van Dyke, Director, MultiModal Practice Group: "Asset Velocity, Terminal Performance and Network Fluidity" (Barn Conference Room)

Discussion of the critical role of terminals, protecting the manifest network, and the need to manage and measure more than train velocity. Also: The importance of asset velocity, cycle times and terminal performance, railcar velocity and cycle Time, terminal performance, locomotive velocity and cycle time, and manifest traffic and network fluidity.

12:30 - 13:30

Lunch (Served in the Main Conference Dining Room)

13:30 - 14:45

Jason Kuehn, Partner, MultiModal Systems Practice; Robert Reid, Partner, Mercer Management Consulting: "Improving Freight Terminal Performance and Capacity." (Barn Conference Room)

As traffic increases, railroads are finding that improving classification yard performance is a critical issue both in improving service/cost metrics, but also as a key component in efforts to increase network capacity. Improving performance requires a holistic perspective to the range of intra-terminal and network/system issues impacting terminals. As will be discussed in the first presentation, properly structured and supported internal improvement programs can be quite successful. But some railroads may find that the lack of terminal management talent, desire to focus resources elsewhere, or even the lack of capital may lead them to consider turning to third parties to produce the required terminal performance improvements. How these new structures might be applied to terminals is the subject of the second presentation.

14:45 - 15:00

Closing Remarks (Barn Conference Room)

15:00 - 16:00

Informal Discussion on Case Histories - Informal session with Mercer MultiModal Consultants and railway representatives to discuss various case histories of planning for freight railways. (Barn Conference Room)