Planning rolling stock maintenance: Optimization of train arrival dates at a maintenance center

Abstract

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>A railway network is an indispensable part of the public transportation system in many major cities around the world. In order to provide a safe and reliable service, a fleet of passenger trains must undergo regular maintenance. These maintenance operations are lengthy procedures, which are planned for one year or a longer period. The planning specifies the dates of trains' arrival at the maintenance center and should take into account the uncertain duration of maintenance operations, the periods of validity of the previous maintenance, the desired number of trains in service, and the capacity of the maintenance center. The paper presents a nonlinear programming formulation of the considered problem and several optimization procedures which were compared by computational experiments using real world data. The results of these experiments indicate that the presented approach is capable to be used in real world planning process.</p>