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...

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...