A mathematical programming model to select maintenance strategies in railway networks

Fecarotti, Claudia; Andrews, John; Pesenti, Raffaele

Abstract

This paper presents a nonlinear integer programming model to support the selection of maintenance strategies to implement on different segments of a railway network. Strategies are selected which collectively minimise the impact of sections’ conditions on service, given network availability and budget constraints. Different metrics related to the network topology, sections’ availability, service frequency, performance requirements and maintenance costs, are combined into a quantitative approach with a holistic view. The main contribution is to provide a simple yet effective modelling approach and solution method which are suitable for large networks and make use of standard solvers. Both an ad hoc heuristic solution and relaxation methods are developed, the latter enabling the quality of the heuristic solution to be estimated. The availability of railway lines is computed by exploiting the analogy with series–parallel networks. By varying the model parameters, a scenario analysis is performed to give insight into the influence of the system parameters on the selection of strategies, thus enabling more informed decisions. For its simple structure, the model is versatile to address similar problems arising in the maintenance of other types of networks, such as road and bridges networks, when deciding on the strategic allocation of maintenance efforts.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jul 20, 2021
• Online Publication Date: Jul 24, 2021
• Publication Date: Dec 1, 2021
• Deposit Date: Sep 9, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 25, 2022
• Journal: Reliability Engineering & System Safety
• Print ISSN: 0951-8320
• Publisher: Elsevier BV
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 216
• Article Number: 107940
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ress.2021.107940
• Keywords: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering; Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/6190348
• Publisher URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0951832021004518
• Additional Information: This article is maintained by: Elsevier; Article Title: A mathematical programming model to select maintenance strategies in railway networks; Journal Title: Reliability Engineering & System Safety; CrossRef DOI link to publisher maintained version: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ress.2021.107940; Content Type: article; Copyright: © 2021 Published by Elsevier Ltd.