An optimization model for integrated planning of railway traffic and network maintenance

Railway transportation systems are important for society and have many challenging and important planning problems. Train services as well as maintenance of a railway network need to be scheduled efficiently, but have mostly been treated as two separate planning problems. Since these activities are mutually exclusive they must be coordinated and should ideally be planned together. In this paper we present a mixed integer programming model for solving an integrated railway traffic and network maintenance problem. The aim is to find a long term tactical plan that optimally schedules train free windows sufficient for a given volume of regular maintenance together with the wanted train traffic. A spatial and temporal aggregation is used for controlling the available network capacity. The properties of the proposed model are analyzed and computational experiments on various synthetic problem instances are reported. Model extensions and possible modifications are discussed as well as future research directions.