PLANNING ROLLING STOCK MAINTENANCE: OPTIMIZATION OF TRAIN ARRIVAL DATES AT A MAINTENANCE CENTER

Abstract

A railway network is an indispensable part of the public transportation system in many major cities around the world. In order to providea safe and reliable service, a eet of passenger trains must undergo regularmaintenance. These maintenance operations are lengthy procedures, whichare planned for one year or a longer period. The planning specifies the datesof trains' arrival at the maintenance center and should take into account theuncertain duration of maintenance operations, the periods of validity of the previousmaintenance, the desired number of trains in service, and the capacity ofthe maintenance center. The paper presents a nonlinear programming formulationof the considered problem and several optimization procedures which werecompared by computational experiments using real world data. The results ofthese experiments indicate that the presented approach is capable to be usedin real world planning process