Scheduling Infrastructure Renewal for Railway Networks
Publication: Journal of Infrastructure Systems
Volume 25, Issue 4
Abstract
The pressing necessity to renew infrastructure assets in developed railway systems leads to an increased number of activities to be scheduled annually. Scheduling of renewal activities for a railway network is a critical task because these activities often require a significant amount of time and create a capacity conflict in operation scheduling. This paper discusses economic and technological aspects, opportunities, and constraints in the renewals of multiple rail infrastructure components at several locations in a railway network. We addressed and modeled a challenging situation in which there were interrelationships between different track lines, and thus, possession of a track line could affect the other track lines and prevent renewal works on them. A mathematical formulation for the railway infrastructure renewal scheduling problem in the network context was presented to minimize the total renewal and unavailability costs. A method based on a triple-prioritization rule and an optimal sharing of renewal times allocated for different types of rail infrastructure components in a possession is proposed to solve the problem. The method was applied to a real case of a regional railway network in Northern Netherlands and it was shown that up to 13% of total costs can be saved compared with the current scheduling practice.
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Acknowledgments
The work presented in this paper was funded by the Explorail Research Programme, a collaboration of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), ProRail (the Dutch Railway Agency), and Technology Foundation STW.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Infrastructure Systems
Volume 25 • Issue 4 • December 2019
Copyright
©2019 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Oct 5, 2018
Accepted: Jun 10, 2019
Published online: Sep 28, 2019
Published in print: Dec 1, 2019
Discussion open until: Feb 28, 2020
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