Optimal routing and scheduling of periodic inspections in large-scale railroad networks

Fan Peng, Yanfeng Ouyang, Kamalesh Somani

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

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 languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)163-171
Number of pages9
JournalJournal of Rail Transport Planning and Management
Volume3
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - 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

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