Abstract
Railroads use a set of rail inspection teams to periodically examine the status of rail tracks across the railroad network. The rail inspection scheduling problem (RISP) is a large-scale routing and scheduling problem where thousands of inspection tasks are to be scheduled subject to many complex constraints. This paper proposes a vehicle routing problem formulation for RISP and develops a customized heuristic algorithm to effectively solve the problem. Real-world case studies show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms commercial solvers and the state-of-art manual solution approach. The proposed approach has been adopted by a Class I railroad to enhance safety and operational efficiency.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 163-171 |
Number of pages | 9 |
Journal | Journal of Rail Transport Planning and Management |
Volume | 3 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Nov 2013 |
Keywords
- Heuristic
- Local search
- Periodic vehicle routing
- Rail inspection
- Railroad maintenance
- Scheduling
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Transportation
- Computer Science Applications
- Civil and Structural Engineering
- Modeling and Simulation
- Management Science and Operations Research