Scheduling preventive railway maintenance activities

Abstract

A railway system needs a substantial amount of maintenance. To prevent unexpected breakdowns as much as possible, preventive maintenance is required. In this paper we discuss the preventive maintenance scheduling problem (PMSP), where (short) routine activities and (long) unique projects have to be scheduled in a certain period. To reduce costs and inconvenience for the travellers and operators, these activities should be scheduled together as much as possible. We present two versions of the PMSP, one with fixed intervals between two consecutive executions of the same routine work, and one with only a maximum interval. Apart from giving a math programming formulation for the PMSP and for its extension we also present some heuristics. In addition, we compare the performance of these heuristics with the optimal solution using some randomly generated instances.

Keywords:

• rail transport
• maintenance
• scheduling
• optimization
• heuristics

Acknowledgements

We thank Gábor Maróti for his useful comments and the experts from Strukton Railinfra, The Netherlands, for providing us information about planning and performing railway maintenance activities.