Scheduling and facility design for transit railcar maintenance

This paper develops models to evaluate the operational efficiency of altern ative designs for railcar maintenance facilities. The focus is on utilizati on of maintenance positions in shops where multiple cars are assigned to th e same track, creating the possibility of blocking. The paper develops and evaluates two rules for assigning jobs to shop stalls, one based on utilizi ng stalls in tandem with inserted idle time and the other not using inserte d idle time. The performance is evaluated as a function of the number of st alls per track and whether the track is one-ended or two-ended. (C) 2000 El sevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.