Title

Formulation and Solution Approaches to the Rail Maintenance Production Gang Scheduling Problem

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-2010

Publication Source

Journal of Transportation Engineering

Abstract

The rail industry spends billions of dollars each year on maintenance and renewal of its track infrastructure. The scheduling of these maintenance projects is extremely complex, with numerous hard and soft cost trade-offs and job scheduling constraints. Scheduling requires consideration of efficient maintenance production “gang” routing around the rail network while paying close attention to any train delay such maintenance projects might cause. Despite this importance and complexity, the subject has been largely ignored in the literature. We evaluate two formulations (time-space network mixed integer program and job scheduling) and three modeling formulation and solution methodologies (integer programming, constraint programming, and genetic algorithms) for scheduling rail gangs to annual renewal projects and discuss their relative merits in terms of parsimony of model formulation, solution time, and solution quality. The purpose of this paper is to identify the most fruitful avenues for further research on this novel application.

Inclusive pages

701-708

ISBN/ISSN

0733-947X

Comments

Permission documentation is on file.

Publisher

American Society of Civil Engineers

Volume

136

Issue

8

Peer Reviewed

yes

Link to Full Text

Share

COinS