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Applications of Constraint Programming in Railway Maintenance
Keeping Sweden's extensive railway network of 15600 km safe and efficient is no small feat. Regular tamping, crucial for maintaining track ballast integrity, is a must to prevent safety risks like derailments and rapid degradation of the railway track quality. The railway maintenance contractor Infranord is tasked with maintaining the railway infrastructure in Sweden. Infranord faces the challenge of optimally scheduling their limited set of tamping machines in the entire country. This thesis explores using Constraint Programming (CP) to tackle these scheduling problems both on a shift-by-shift basis and a semi-annual strategic perspective. Two problems are presented: optimising tamping shifts for segments of a single railway track and allocating machines to locations and weeks for multiple tracks over a set of 13 given weeks. CP offers a flexible approach for modelling and solving these optimisation problems. For the first problem, two models based on graph-constructions are compared, with the second achieving optimal shifts for the entire dataset. However, complexities arise when considering more than four shifts, prompting an approximation strategy. For the second problem, a timetable-based model is proposed, yet achieving optimal solutions is not feasible, suggesting areas for future improvements.
Applications of Constraint Programming in Railway Maintenance
Keeping Sweden's extensive railway network of 15600 km safe and efficient is no small feat. Regular tamping, crucial for maintaining track ballast integrity, is a must to prevent safety risks like derailments and rapid degradation of the railway track quality. The railway maintenance contractor Infranord is tasked with maintaining the railway infrastructure in Sweden. Infranord faces the challenge of optimally scheduling their limited set of tamping machines in the entire country. This thesis explores using Constraint Programming (CP) to tackle these scheduling problems both on a shift-by-shift basis and a semi-annual strategic perspective. Two problems are presented: optimising tamping shifts for segments of a single railway track and allocating machines to locations and weeks for multiple tracks over a set of 13 given weeks. CP offers a flexible approach for modelling and solving these optimisation problems. For the first problem, two models based on graph-constructions are compared, with the second achieving optimal shifts for the entire dataset. However, complexities arise when considering more than four shifts, prompting an approximation strategy. For the second problem, a timetable-based model is proposed, yet achieving optimal solutions is not feasible, suggesting areas for future improvements.
Applications of Constraint Programming in Railway Maintenance
Willman, Carl (author)
2024-01-01
24029
Theses
Electronic Resource
English
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