An optimization model for integrated planning of railway traffic and network maintenance

Abstract

Railway transportation systems are important for society and have many challenging and important planning problems. Train services as well as maintenance of a railway network need to be scheduled efficiently, but have mostly been treated as two separate planning problems. Since these activities are mutually exclusive they must be coordinated and should ideally be planned together. In this paper we present a mixed integer programming model for solving an integrated railway traffic and network maintenance problem. The aim is to find a long term tactical plan that optimally schedules train free windows sufficient for a given volume of regular maintenance together with the wanted train traffic. A spatial and temporal aggregation is used for controlling the available network capacity. The properties of the proposed model are analysed and computational experiments on various synthetic problem instances are reported. Model extensions and possible modifications are discussed as well as future research directions.

Coordinating maintenance windows and train traffic: a case study

“…Our problem is slightly different, but clearly suffers from a similar deficiency. In cases with homogenous or very similar train services it is possible to introduce separation constraints (see Lidén and Joborn, 2017) that achieve more realistic plans, but for cases with mixed traffic and varying train costs it is more cumbersome to resolve this issue. Hence, it is necessary to verify whether feasible timetables are possible to achieve, either by using manual reviews or some technical method such as simulation or a timetabling tool.…”

“…Although the monetary volumes cited above indicate a large potential for a more efficient use of maintenance spendings if the coordination with train traffic can be improved, there are few research publications that treat such joint scheduling problems. Lidén and Joborn (2017) presented a macroscopic optimization model for the integrated scheduling of maintenance windows and train services, which was improved and extended with maintenance crew resource considerations in Lidén et al (2018). The methods developed in these previous publications were tested on various theoretical test instances, but were not applied on any practical case, which is the aim of the current work.…”

Robust Train Scheduling Problem with Optimized Maintenance Planning on High-Speed Railway Corridors: The China Case

“…The alternative timetable has the minimum deviation from the original timetable. Lidén and Joborn [25] presented a mixedinteger programming model for long term tactical plan, which simultaneously considered train services and railway network maintenances. The experimental results showed that the model could handle large-scale instances.…”

“…24indicates the fact that when SDSA-train arrives at major station , if the maintenance on segment from major station to major station + 1 is being executed, then SDSA-train must select an operation mode (i.e., Mode 1 or Mode 2) as shown in Figure 3. Constraint (25) indicates the fact that when SDSA-train arrives at major station , there is no conflict with the maintenance window, but it will conflict with the maintenance window at major station + 1 if SDSA-train continues to run, which is illustrated in Figure 5. Then SDSAtrain must select Mode 1 or Mode 2, namely, waiting at major station or switching to normal-speed railway corridor.…”

A Customized Hybrid Approach to Infrastructure Maintenance Scheduling in Railroad Networks under Variable Productivities

“…Rail infrastructure maintenance is so important that it has attracted a lot of attention from both the rail industry and the academic community. Strategic and tactical maintenance planning of railway infrastructures (Su et al, 2017;Xie et al, 2016), rail inspection scheduling (Lannez et al, 2015;Osman et al, 2017;Peng et al, 2013), as well as the coordination of train scheduling and infrastructure maintenance (D'Ariano et al, 2017;Forsgren et al, 2013;Lidén and Joborn, 2017;Luan et al, 2017;Vansteenwegen et al, 2016), have been widely studied in the literature. See Lidén (2015) for a more detailed review of the rail infrastructure maintenance planning problems.…”