“…Tamping is considered effective in treating track geometry defects and is widely studied. Several optimisation tools for tamping scheduling have been formulated, such as integer linear programming (Dao, Basten, & Hartmann, 2018), mixed-integer linear/nonlinear programming (Famurewa, Xin, Rantatalo, & Kumar, 2015;Gustavsson, 2015;Khajehei et al, 2020;Vale & Ribeiro, 2014;Wen, Li, & Salling, 2016), and heuristic methods (Khajehei et al, 2020;Zhang, Andrews, & Wang, 2013). The parameters of interest include cost, possession time, the total number of tamping operations over a planning horizon, and track condition captured by TQIs.…”