Scheduling preventive railway maintenance activities with resource constraints

In this paper, we focus on the scheduling of preventive railway maintenance activities. The objective is to keep the railway infrastructure in good operating conditions at low costs, also taking into account the limited available resources in what concerns crew members. Equipments degrade with usage and age and a good preventive maintenance program can greatly reduce their unreliability in the sense that expectable failures can be anticipated. We propose a mixed integer programming formulation for the problem of scheduling preventive railway maintenance activities and a Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) algorithm to solve large instances of the problem.