A genetic-algorithm-based approach for scheduling the renewal of railway track components

This article describes a procedure that may be used to help synchronize the renewal of railway track components so that the costs of the renewal processes are minimized. To this end a model has been developed to maximize the cost benefit by combining renewal activities for a section of track. As the problem may be considered to be a mixed integer program with constrains, a genetic algorithm (GA)-based approach was used to find the solution. Techniques that may be used to reduce the computational effort required to perform the analysis are also described.The applicability of the approach to optimize the renewal of railway track components is shown by means of an example.