Optimal scheduling of track maintenance activities for railway networks

Abstract

We consider optimal scheduling of track maintenance activities for a railway network divided into sections. The goal is to find an optimal time schedule for the maintenance activities and optimal routes for the maintenance crew (including all necessary equipment and technicians) that minimize the total setup costs and the travel costs over the whole planning horizon. The maintenance time budget, which can be the same, different, or flexible for each period, and the minimum time to maintain a section are also taken into account. We recast the track maintenance scheduling problem with three different settings as three variants of the Capacitated Arc Routing Problem with Fixed cost (CARPF), which are solved by transforming them into three node routing problems. The proposed approach is demonstrated using a case study of a part of the Dutch regional network.