Multi-level condition-based maintenance planning for railway infrastructures - A scenario-based chance-constrained approach

Reference:
Z. Su, A. Jamshidi, A. Núñez, S. Baldi, and B. De Schutter, "Multi-level condition-based maintenance planning for railway infrastructures - A scenario-based chance-constrained approach," Transportation Research Part C, vol. 84, pp. 92-123, Nov. 2017.

Abstract:
This paper develops a multi-level decision making approach for the optimal planning of maintenance operations of railway infrastructures, which are composed of multiple components divided into basic units for maintenance. Scenario-based chance-constrained Model Predictive Control (MPC) is used at the high level to determine an optimal long-term component-wise intervention plan for a railway infrastructure, and the Time Instant Optimization (TIO) approach is applied to transform the MPC optimization problem with both continuous and integer decision variables into a nonlinear continuous optimization problem. The middle-level problem determines the allocation of time slots for the maintenance interventions suggested at the high level to optimize the trade-off between traffic disruption and the setup cost of maintenance slots. Based on the high-level intervention plan, the low-level problem determines the optimal clustering of the basic units to be treated by a maintenance agent, subject to the time limit imposed by the maintenance slots. The proposed approach is applied to the optimal treatment of squats, with real data from the Eindhoven-Weert line in the Dutch railway network.