Rail Events and Re-planning

You can use rail events to trigger re-planning of shipments. This topic will focus on Intermodal.

Rail events provide the necessary information to update the progress of a shipment and to allow re-planning of subsequent movements. Rail events are provided with an industry standard list of information that may be augmented with commercial and projected information. Agents can be configured to listen for all events for all classification systems regardless of who owns the classification system.

Event messages contain the who what where and when details of the rail event. Details include event location, status code, carrier SCAC, destination SPLC, and so on. See a sample event message.

Prerequisite

Some data is required for the setup for the following to work such as SPLCs. The Centralized Station Master (CSM) is a geographic location file which contains data about rail and motor carrier points for North America and international areas. The CSM is not public data. It is owned by Railinc. The CSM file is used to construct many STATIC DATA ELEMENTS in OTM. There are about 50,000 unique SPLC locations and for Sighting Locations, OTM requires that the user create 50,000 Location with the SPLC attribute and the Role of Rail Station. This is required for visibility.

Intermodal Scenarios

Scenario 1: Local or Through

One rail carrier bill. More than one rail carrier may transport.

Scenario 2: Rule 11

More than one rail carrier bill. More than one rail carrier transports. More than one shipment and more than one ground service schedule.

Scenario 3: Crosstown

More than one rail shipment with a truck movement in between. More than one shipment and more than one ground service schedule.

Transformation of Rail Event Data to Shipment Data – Persisting the Correct Data. Sample Flow

When a rail event happens before you get to the rail destination, the ETA on the event will update the estimated arrival time. When planning a shipment, OTM will populate the planned arrival and planned departure times. See the Agent Actions section below for details on the agent actions.

The CALCULATE AHEAD/LATE and PERSIST agent action will calculate the time by which the shipment is either early or late and save that actual or estimated time as required.

The Estimate Recovery Time agent action will estimate the estimated departure based on the delta between the planned arrival and the planned departure.

The Re-drive Downstream Shipments agent action will update the estimated arrival and estimated departure times of the next shipment.

Agent Construction

Agents listen for the status codes via the TRACKING EVENT - PROCESSING REQUEST agent event. An agent may listen for more than one event and can listen for the same event with different classification systems. Public automation agents can be copied and modified. They are inactive by default.

Ahead_Late  Persist Sample -  Arrival Event: this public automation agent uses the agent action CALC AHEAD/LATE AND PERSIST to update the shipment to indicate if it is early or late and by how much. It also persists this information in the stop and updates the ETA time and the Ahead/Late fields on a shipment.

Ahead_Late Sample -  Arrival Event: this public automation agent can set the Ahead/Late value on the tracking event and/or shipment. This is similar to the above agent, however more manual configuration is needed with this agent than using the above agent. The above agent also persists the data.

Tracking Tab on Shipment

The agent action UPDATE SHIPMENT provides much of the information on the Shipment Tracking Tab including sighting information, SCAC and Ahead/Late times.

Agent Actions

There are separate actions for the tracking event and the shipment. The Data Type Association (DTA), when needed, allows you to perform actions on the previously linked object. The DTA for shipment is assumed to be the shipment that is associated with the tracking event.

Calculate Ahead/Late and Persist: This action has several functions:

• Eliminates the need for you to create and manage multiple queries.
• Finds the correct shipment stops based on matching SPLC.
• Persists the Actual or Estimated time as appropriate.
• Calculates the agent variables for Ahead/Late use in subsequent actions.

Set Indicator: You have the ability to set up to four thresholds an then specify the color for the indicator (Green, Yellow, Orange, Red). The action updates the color and image of the indicator on the object. The map will pick up the color but not the shape from the indicator on the Tracking Event for the POSITION to be displayed.  

Set Event Lateness Value: You can specify the meaning of the degree of lateness that correlates with the values (Ahead, On time, Tardy, Late). The action updates the two fields on the object for the time, and the meaning.

Assign Next Repetition Schedule: This finds the next available schedule for a ground service shipment, adjusts the shipment times accordingly and re-drives downstream shipments. This is used with Ingate rail events.

Estimate Recovery Time: This updates the planned departure time. It is used with In-transit, and Train Arrival rail events.

Re-drive Downstream Shipments: If the end time of the shipment has changed, you can use this action to redrive down stream shipments and update their times accordingly. This action will find a shipment from the car destination SPLC or the SPLC from the tracking event. It will then use the end time of the shipment to re-drive shipments that are downstream from this shipment and will update their times accordingly. When a shipment is ahead of schedule or ontime, there's no need to redrive downstream shipments.