SCHEDULING OF RAILWAY TRACK MAINTENANCE ACTIVITIES AND CREWS

Before railway track maintenance crews can undertake any work, the all ocation of activities to available time intervals in the train schedul e as well as to crews must be undertaken. This paper puts forward a mo del aimed at determining the best allocation of maintenance activities and crews so as to minimise the disruption to and from scheduled trai ns and to reduce completion time. The model is subject to constraints such as available budget; maintenance activity precedence; track avail ability; and minimum travel time between track links. Solution to the model is found using the tabu search heuristic far which the neighbour hood is defined by swapping the order of jobs, maintenance crews, or b oth. Application to a 300km hack corridor with a four day planning hor izon is discussed along with the impacts of modifying the number of ma intenance crews. The optimal schedule achieved an 8% reduction in expe cted interference delay with the train schedule and a 7% reduction in average completion times, relative to the solution which was construct ed manually.