Strategic Gang Scheduling for Railroad Maintenance

PDFTech ReportRailroad transportationMaintenance of wayMaintenanceMaintenance practicesInteger programmingHeuristic methodsMathematicsIllinoisNorthwestern University (Evanston, Ill.). Center for the Commercialization of Innovative Transportation TechnologyBorraz-S\uc3\ua1nchez, ConradoKlabjan, DiegoNorthwestern University (Evanston, Ill.) Dept. of Industrial Engineering and Management SciencesUniversity Transportation Centers Program (U.S.)NTL-RAIL TRANSPORTATION-Rail Planning and PolicyNTL-SAFETY AND SECURITY-Rail SafetyUS Transportation CollectionWe address the railway track maintenance scheduling problem. The problem stems from thesignificant percentage of the annual budget invested by the railway industry for maintaining its railwaytracks. The process requires consideration of human resource allocations (gangs), as well as effective logisticsfor equipment movement and routing around the rail network under time window constraints. We proposean efficient solution approach to minimize total costs incurred by the maintenance projects or jobs withina given planning horizon. This is accomplished by designing a job-time network model to capture feasibleschedules under the constraints of job precedence and developing a mathematical programming heuristic tosolve the underlying model. The key ingredient is an iterative process that extracts and then re-inserts jobsbased on an integer programming model. Computational experiments show the capability of the proposedheuristic to schedule more than 1,000 jobs and more than 30 gangs