In the daily management of regional railways companies, one of the problems
they have to deal with is to decide, everyday, the cleaning policy (that i
s, which units should be cleaned, what kind of cleaning should be done to t
he units, and when to do them in order to maximize the efficiency). This de
cision has a big impact on the service quality perceived by the passengers.
In this paper we discuss the use of IT for this purpose. We present a MILP
model to define the most adequate cleaning operations for daily decision m
aking, using a scheduling algorithm for sequencing the operations previousl
y chosen, in order to guarantee the needed resources when executing the sol
ution. These procedures have been implemented in the regional network of As
turias of the Spanish National Railway Company.