Availability Approach to Optimizing Railway Track Renewal Operations
Publication: Journal of Transportation Engineering
Volume 139, Issue 9
Abstract
This paper proposes a multiobjective optimization approach for planning railway ballast, rail, and sleeper renewal operations. The objective is to support an informed decision that considers not only the railway track life-cycle cost (LCC) but also the track occupation times required to perform interventions. Two objective functions were minimized, as follows: (1) railway track unavailability caused by railway track maintenance and renewal operations, and (2) railway track components’ LCC. Furthermore, to rationalize the renewal strategy, the model considers a multicomponent formulation that assesses, in time and space, the opportunistic combination of railway track renewal activities. A numerical application of the model on a real case study (Lisbon-Oporto line) is developed and discussed. The results show the interest of using this simple multiobjective optimization approach to obtain a decision-making process to support the scheduling of major railway track renewal works with an informed LCC-unavailability trade-off.
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Acknowledgments
The writers thank the Portuguese Railway Infrastructure Manager, REFER, E.P.E., for its support and cooperation. The support of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), FCT project reference PTDC/SENTRA/112975/2009 and FCT Ph.D. grant reference SFRH/BD/51327/2010 are also gratefully acknowledged. The writers also thank the reviewers for their comments, which enabled the presentation of this paper to be improved.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Transportation Engineering
Volume 139 • Issue 9 • September 2013
Pages: 941 - 948
Copyright
© 2013 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Feb 19, 2013
Accepted: May 13, 2013
Published online: May 15, 2013
Published in print: Sep 1, 2013
Discussion open until: Oct 15, 2013
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