Keywords: operations research, simulated annealing, routine maintenance scheduling problem, railway infrastructure maintenance, greedy heuristic, job order assignment, TSP variant.

Routine maintenance of railway infrastructure components, such as ballast tamping, is important to keep a high level of travel safety and comfort. If the track condition falls below a certain level, the train speed must be restricted, which leads to delays and penalty costs for the operator. By scheduling the maintenance jobs these penalty costs will be minimised together with the costs for travelling from job to job.

In this paper, the model for the novel routine maintenance scheduling problem (RMSP) in a railway track network is presented. A greedy heuristic and a simulated annealing approach to solve the problem have been developed. Different variants of the simulated annealing approach, different methods to produce an initial solution and different approaches to generate a neighbourhood solution, are designed, implemented and compared.

purchase the full-text of this paper (price £20)

go to the previous paper
go to the next paper
return to the table of contents
return to the book description
purchase this book (price £65 +P&P)