Short-term rail rolling stock rostering and maintenance scheduling

This paper describes an optimization framework for railway rolling stock rostering and maintenance scheduling. A key problem in railway rostering planning requires covering a given set of services and maintenance works with limited rolling stock units. The problem is solved via a two-step approach that combines the scheduling tasks related to train services, short-term maintenance operations and empty runs. A commercial MIP solver is used for the development of a real-time decision support tool. A campaign of experiments on real-world scenarios from Trenitalia (Italian train operating company) illustrates the improvement achievable by the approach when compared to the practical solutions.