Abstract
In this paper, we focus on the scheduling of preventive railway maintenance activities. The objective is to keep the railway infrastructure in good operating conditions at low costs, also taking into account the limited available resources in what concerns crew members. Equipments degrade with usage and age and a good preventive maintenance program can greatly reduce their unreliability in the sense that expectable failures can be anticipated. We propose a mixed integer programming formulation for the problem of scheduling preventive railway maintenance activities and a Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) algorithm to solve large instances of the problem.
1 Introduction
Rail transport is one of the safest and most environmentally friendly means of conveyance of passengers and goods. By making regions and markets more accessible, it plays a main role in the development of countries due not only to its impact on the economy but also to its social role. In order to support the increase of traffic due to globalization and personal interchanges, many efforts have to be done to keep rail transport safe, efficient and competitive. This can be achieved through technical elements like supervision, maintenance, and standardization.
6 Conclusions
We address a scheduling preventive railway maintenance activities problem and propose a Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) formulation and a Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) algorithm to solve this problem.
Computational results show that our VNS is quite efficient for the tested instances, always providing the optimal solutions for the instances where the MIP model was able to find them.
