Scheduling Infrastructure Renewal for Railway Networks

Abstract

The pressing necessity to renew infrastructure assets in developed railway systems leads to an increased number of activities to be scheduled annually. Scheduling of renewal activities for a railway network is a critical task since these activities often require a significant amount of time and create a capacity conflict in operation scheduling. This paper discusses economic and technological aspects, opportunities, and constraints in the renewals of multiple rail infrastructure components at several locations in a railway network. We address and model a challenging situation that there are interrelationships between different track lines, and thus, possession of a track line can have impacts on the other track lines and prevent renewal works on them. A mathematical formulation for the railway infrastructure renewal scheduling problem in the network context is presented to minimize the total renewal and unavailability costs. A method based on a triple-prioritization rule and an optimal sharing of renewal times allocated for different types of rail infrastructure components in a possession is proposed to solve the problem. The method is applied to a real case of a regional railway network in Northern Netherlands and it is shown that up to 13% of total costs can be saved compared to the current scheduling practice.

Data‐driven maintenance planning and scheduling based on predicted railway track condition

“…Algorithm 2: Cost optimisation The operational level aims to find a maintenance schedule by producing the maintenance activities' spatial order and a daily schedule. For tamping, the selection is based on the available maintenance window, tamping operation and transportation time, and the sum of maintenance costs described in Equations ( 5), (8), and (9). Table 2 provides pseudocode with the steps in Algorithm 2.…”

“…Transportation cost (TC) is the cost of transporting the maintenance equipment from a depot to the maintenance position, shown in Equation (8).…”

“…The preventive maintenance planning and scheduling problem include two major maintenance types: predetermined (time-based) maintenance [5][6][7][8] or condition-based maintenance (CBM). [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] CBM in the railway track aims to monitor the track geometry condition and keep the degradation process under control.…”

Assessing the Effects of Closure-Free Periods on Railway Intervention Costs and Service

“…For example, 16% of the costs of a switch replacement can be saved when combined with a switch replacement of a neighboring switch. This percentage was estimated based on the results of Dao et al (2019). For track and catenary interventions, it was assumed that 50% of the engineering and logistic costs can be shared when neighboring track assets have intervention simultaneously; engineering and logistic costs compose 40% of the total costs (Caetano and Teixeira 2016).…”

Topological Approach for Optimizing Railroad Freight Network Restoration after Disruptions

“…To optimize the infrastructure renewal schedule for a railway network so that the sum of renewal and unavailability cost over a specified period was minimized, Dao et al ( 25 ) proposed a scheduling strategy which was a constrained three-step prioritization rule based on criticality of three levels, namely location, component type, and component. In a similar context, Mohammadi et al ( 26 ) developed a data-driven uncertainty set approximation for handling the uncertainty about effects resulting from maintenance activities.…”