Railway Maintenance Scheduling: Improving the trade-off between runtime and solution quality for annual maintenance possession scheduling with a new, complex problem definition for the Dutch railways

There is increasingly more expensive maintenance that needs to be performed on the Dutch railway network. Good maintenance schedules reduce costs, minimise hindrance to passenger and freight travel, and follow restrictions imposed by available resources, legislation and other agreements. The railway maintainer has modelled this maintenance...

Predicting track quality using structural elements and relative track geometry data measured by RILA: A Machine Learning Classification approach

Track quality measures differ from standard to standard. Widely used indices for track quality are the standard deviations of the rail longitudinal level data and the standard deviations of alignment data. Researchers have opted for various learning methods as to relate track quality to different parameters. Some research has gone to the point...

Systems thinking approach for improving maintenance management of discrete rail assets: a review and future perspectives

Performance evaluation and maintenance planning are gaining importance with ageing rail infrastructure and increasing demand on track safety and continuous availability. The discrete/point railway assets (e.g. bridges, level crossings) together with extended track sections constitute the main railway network infrastructure. The former has...

Macomi Maintenance: A user-centric data-analytic platform for railway maintenance planning optimisation

This thesis project investigated how user-centred design(UCD) contributes to the railway maintenance planning optimisation. A new UX concept and digital prototype were designed to provide intuitive interaction and clear structure to support the planners confidently and independently optimise railway maintenance planning on a digital platform. ...

Solving a real-world rail maintenance scheduling problem

The rail network in the Netherlands is one of the busiest in Europe. To ensure a safe and reliable infrastructure, preventive maintenance is of utmost importance. ProRail, the sole maintainer of the railway infrastructure in the Netherlands, spends hundreds of millions of dollars on maintenance each year. Due to the complexity and busyness of...

Optimizing Long-Term Planning of Railway Maintenance

Railway maintenance is currently planned according to a fixed schedule, mostly of one year. This is usually not optimal when considering the cost of maintenance, of possessions and of failure. However, an approach that minimizes the sum of these costs was not yet available. This paper presents a statistical analysis method and an optimization...