An opportunistic preventive maintenance policy for tamping scheduling of railway tracks

This paper proposes an opportunistic preventive maintenance policy to schedule tamping interventions aiming to minimize the total maintenance cost. In this policy, the goal is to obtain an opportunistic maintenance threshold (OMT) to decide when to perform preventive tamping operations on given railway segments to minimize total maintenance cost associated with tamping operations. A steady-state genetic algorithm was used to simultaneously find an OMT threshold and tamping scheduling. The proposed approach is tested on data collected from a ballasted railway track. The results show that by taking into consideration an OMT threshold, machine preparation cost can be reduced by about 46%. Moreover, by performing a sensitivity analysis of the tamping effectiveness, it is observed that the negative impact of inefficient tamping is greater than the positive impact of efficient tamping on the total maintenance cost and track quality in this case study.