Scheduling of railway track maintenance activities and crews

• Published in: The Journal of the Operational Research Society Vol. 49; no. 10; pp. 1026 - 1033
• Main Author: Higgins, A
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Taylor & Francis 01.10.1998; Palgrave Macmillan UK
• Subjects: Business and Management; Case-Oriented Paper; integer programming; maintenance; Management; Operations Research/Decision Theory; rail transport; scheduling; tabu search; scheduling; rail transport; tabu search; integer programming; maintenance
• DOI: 10.1057/palgrave.jors.2600612
• ISSN: 0160-5682

Before railway track maintenance crews can undertake any work, the allocation of activities to available time intervals in the train schedule as well as to crews must be undertaken. This paper puts forward a model aimed at determining the best allocation of maintenance activities and crews so as to mininise the disruption to and from scheduled trains and to reduce completion time. The model is subject to constraints such as available budget; maintenance activity precedence; track availability; and minimum travel time between track links. Solution to the model is found using the tabu search heuristic for which the neighbourhood is defined by swapping the order of jobs, maintenance crews, or both. Application to a 300 km track corridor with a four day planning horizon is discussed along with the impacts of modifying the number of maintenance crews. The optimal schedule achieved an 8% reduction in expected interference delay with the train schedule and a 7% reduction in average completion times, relative to the solution which was constructed manually.