Optimizing periodic maintenance operations for railroad tracks subjected to deterioration

Abstract

Railroad operations are inherently complex and source of several problems. Most of the maintenance operations require specialized teams with large and expensive equipment, so it is essential that these resources are used efficiently in order to guarantee adequate safety levels under a restricted budget. Our objective through-out this paper is propose an optimization model that minimizes the cost of periodic maintenance operations for railroad tracks subjected to deterioration. Our main contribution consists in unify the deterioration-based maintenance problem with the maintenance workforce routing by a sequential procedure composed by two stages. Real-world case study on a existing US railroad shows that the proposed methodology yields reliable an economical solutions in which the repair costs and the expected cost related to the absence of maintenance are balanced. Finally, we evidenced that our proposed model can be easily extended to each new inspection performed.