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OptRail plans with Union Pacific

[ December 2, 2021   //   ]

Optrail, a digital tech company focused on rail innovation, and Union Pacific Railroad today announced implementation of Advanced Movement Planner (AMP) as part of the railroad’s new CADX system. CADX is the primary technology used by Union Pacific’s dispatchers to manage train movement safely and efficiently across its 23-state network. AMP provides real-time information on the hundreds of trains moving across the system, identifying the plans for those trains to traverse the network including how they should meet or pass one another should that be necessary.
Due to OptRail’s unique experience delivering movement planners in Europe and North America, AMP supports a broad set of operating rules. The technology is based on a mathematical approach, which, unlike rule-based algorithms, allows flexibility when modelling the rail operator’s goals and any potential new requirements.
Union Pacific is implementing AMP across its 32,000-mile system and anticipates completion in late 2021, creating the largest railway network in the world to be automated with an optimization-based movement planner.
Rahul Jalali, Union Pacific Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, said, “AMP is a great example of advanced technology driving safety, efficiency, and productivity for Union Pacific. The partnership between OptRail and Union Pacific to build and deploy AMP is a great success story for both companies.”
Paolo Perticaroli, OptRail CEO said, “We were proud when Union Pacific selected us as the supplier for this ambitious undertaking. After much work, it is with great satisfaction that we see the system successfully go live and make history.”
Prof. Carlo Mannino, OptRail scientific advisor and co-founder then stated that “AMP is not only a sophisticated, state-of-the-art software, it is also the fruit of over a decade of research on the mathematics that underlie the train routing and scheduling problem. While the body of literature in this field is vast, it is the first implementation on this scale of a train dispatching tool based on such cutting-edge approaches.”
Delivering this groundbreaking technology solution delivers on OptRail’s mission to develop and perfect products that tackle the planning problems faced by the railway industry.

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