Railway Infrastructure Maintenance - A Survey of Planning Problems and Conducted Research

Railway infrastructure maintenance consumes very large budgets, is complicated to organize and has numerous challenging planning problems. Specifically, the coordination with train traffic operation is of crucial importance. Despite this, little work has been conducted in the operations research area regarding infrastructure maintenance as compared to train traffic operations.The aim of this paper is to give a comprehensive overview of the railway infrastructure maintenance field, the planning problems it contains and the research that has been conducted so far. We present (i) a catalogue of planning problems, based on a series of interviews with experts and planners representing all major stake holders in Sweden and (ii) an extensive literature overview covering more than 60 research references published until 2014 regarding the use of mathematical methods and optimization for solving such planning problems. From this we extract some statistics and a mapping which identify the major lines of work as well as future research possibilities.