A Heuristic Approach for Scheduling of Railway Track Maintenance Machines

The importance of maintenance of any system, with worn out components,  during operation, is  clear. Railway transportation system as a global and public system, requires permanent monitoring and maintenance. Because its reliability, safety and efficiency are highly dependent on the quality of the railway tracks. Due to the fact that the length of the railway tracks and the required maintenance volume are very high, the use of human resources to implement projects is uneconomic and virtually impossible. This is done by mechanized machinery used on railways. Because of the limited number of machines and the need to implement projects as many as possible, it is necessary to develop a heuristic technique capable to take both of the objectives and the priorities and requirements of the railway into account, at the same time. In this paper, the scheduling process of railway tracks maintenance operation in Iran Railways has been studied. A heuristic method has been designed and presented to schedule this operation. In order to see better the algorithm's capabilities, the results of the algorithm has been compared with the plan prepared by Iran Railways in 2017. To validate the algorithm, a simulation model has been developed. The results show that the algorithm can significantly increase the volume of scheduled operations. Providing a plan in a very short time and meeting all of the railway requirements and priorities are the other advantages of the proposed algorithm.