3 research outputs found
A Constructive Framework for the Preventive Signalling Maintenance Crew Scheduling Problem in the Danish Railway system
In this paper we consider the problem of
planning preventive maintenance of railway signals in
Denmark. This case is particularly interesting, as the
entire railway signalling system is currently being upgraded to the new European Railway Traffic Management System (ERTMS) standard. This upgrade has significant implications for signal maintenance scheduling
in the system. We formulate the problem as a multidepot vehicle routing and scheduling problem with time
windows and synchronisation constraints, in a multiday time schedule. The requirement that some tasks
require the simultaneous presence of more than one engineer means that task synchronisation must be considered. A multi-stage constructive framework is proposed, which first distributes maintenance tasks using
a clustering formulation. Following this, a Constraint
Programming (CP) based approach is used to generate
feasible monthly plans for large instances of practical interest. Experimental results indicate that the proposed
framework can generate feasible solutions and schedule a monthly plan of up to 1000 tasks for eight crew members, in a reasonable amount of computational tim