Quiroga, L. M.; Schnieder, E.:
Track maintenance scheduling optimisation under consideration of multiple tamping machine types.
Railways 2012 - The First International Conference on Railway Technology: Research, Development and Maintenance 2012, Las Palmas, Gran Can, Spain, April 2012.
In the framework of high speed railways, an optimal scheduling of maintenance interventions is an issue of increased relevance. In this work a method for optimization of tamping scheduling under consideration of two different tamping machine types is presented. It assumed that one machine type is permanently available and is used for corrective interventions, while the second type is a more modern, faster machine which is available only for a limited number of days per year, and is thus used for preventive, planned interventions. The proposed method is capable to find the optimal number of preventive interventions in order to minimise the total tamping costs, and at the same time find a very detailed tamping schedule where each planned intervention is fully specified. The method is validated by means of a case study basing on real data of 240 km track of a French high speed TGV line. Keywords: Track maintenance, heuristics, tamping, scheduling.