A Heuristic Approach To Railway Track
Maintenance Scheduling
Author(s)
L. M. Quiroga & E. Schnieder
Abstract
Travelling safely and comfortably on high speed railway lines requires excellent
conditions of the whole railway infrastructure in general and of the railway track
geometry in particular. The maintenance process required to achieve such excellent
conditions is largely complex and expensive, demanding an increased amount of
both human and technical resources. In this framework, an optimal scheduling
of maintenance interventions is an issue of increased relevance. In this work
a method for optimization of the tamping scheduling is presented. It is based
on a heuristic algorithm, which finds a very detailed tamping schedule where
each planned intervention is fully specified. The algorithm tries to maximize an
objective function, which is a quantitative expression of the maintenance process’s
objectives defined by the railway company. It first finds an upper bound for the
objective function value, and then returns the best feasible solution found. The
method is validated by means of a case study based on real data of the 240 km
track of a French high speed TGV line. The results presented show that the value
of the best solution found is very near to the upper bound (the difference is smaller
than 1%), with a calculation time of under 1 second using a standard computer, so
we think the heuristic has a great performance potential.
Keywords: track maintenance, heuristics, tamping, scheduling.
1 Introduction
Measuring and keeping railway geometry under control are fundamental tasks of a
railway infrastructure maintenance process. Railway geometry is representative of
the travelling comfort and the derailment risk, so if its deviation exceeds a certain
limit value, the travelling speed on that sector must be reduced. Therefore, railway
Keywords
track maintenance, heuristics, tamping, scheduling
Related Book
Other papers in this volume
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