The Maintenance Location Choice Problem for Railway Rolling Stock

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Maintenance Location Choice Problem (MLCP) for railway rolling stock, proposing a MILP model to optimize maintenance location decisions, enabling more daytime maintenance and improving capacity utilization.

Contribution

It formulates the MLCP and demonstrates its effectiveness and robustness using a MILP model based on Dutch railway data, with acceptable computation times.

Findings

Significant maintenance can be scheduled during daytime.

Model solutions are robust across different scenarios.

Optimization times are suitable for planning purposes.

Abstract

Due to increasing railway use, the capacity at railway yards and maintenance locations is becoming limiting to accommodate existing rolling stock. To reduce capacity issues at maintenance locations during nighttime, railway undertakings consider performing more daytime maintenance, but the choice at which locations personnel needs to be stationed for daytime maintenance is not straightforward. Among other things, it depends on the planned rolling stock circulation and the maintenance activities that need to be performed. This paper presents the Maintenance Location Choice Problem (MLCP) and provides a Mixed Integer Linear Programming model for this problem. The model demonstrates that for a representative rolling stock circulation from the Dutch railways a substantial amount of maintenance activities can be performed during daytime. Also, it is shown that the location choice delivered by the model is robust under various time horizons and rolling stock circulations. Moreover, the running time for optimizing the model is considered acceptable for planning purposes.