In an open railway access market, the provisions of railway infrastructures and train services are separated and independent. Negotiations between the track owner and train service providers are thus required for the allocation of the track capacity and the formulation of the services timetables, in which each party, i.e. a stakeholder, exhibits intelligence from the previous negotiation experi...

This paper describes a new approach to optimisation of railway track maintenance and renewal works via genetic algorithms. Decision support systems and genetic algorithms are used in this study to optimise railway track maintenance and renewal activities. The results obtained in the scope of this study show that planned maintenance and renewal management systems can be developed and successfull...

This paper features a method of synthesizing the track irregularities by which the alignment may be analytically represented by a pseudo-stochastic function, as well as the implementation of such a method in the numerical simulation of the dynamic behaviour of the railway vehicles. The method described in Part I relies on the power spectral density of the track irregularities, as per ORE B 176 ...

The optimal track allocation problem (OPTRA), also known as the train routing problem or the train timetabling problem, is to find, in a given railway network, a conflict-free set of train routes of maximum value. We propose a novel integer programming formulation for this problem that is based on additional ‘configuration’ variables. Its LP-relaxation can be solved in polynomial time. These re...

Railway track-bed materials are mostly in unsaturated state, and their hydro-mechanical properties depend strongly on their water contents or suctions. In France, problematic soils such as collapsible loess and swelling marl can be origin of instability problems for new lines for high speed trains, while the hydro-mechanical behaviour of interlayer soil formed mainly by interpenetration of ball...

Advances in modern machine learning techniques has encouraged interest in the development of vehicle health monitoring (VHM) systems. These techniques are useful for the reduction of maintenance and inspection requirements of railway systems. The performance of rail vehicles running on a track is limited by the lateral instability and track irregularities of a railway wagon. In this study, a fo...

Wireless communications and modern machine learning techniques have jointly been applied in the recent development of vehicle health monitoring (VHM) systems. The performance of rail vehicles running on railway tracks is governed by the dynamic behaviors of railway bogies especially in the cases of lateral instability and track irregularities. In this study we have proposed a system to monitor ...

This paper develops a new decision making method for optimal planning of railway maintenance operations using hybrid Model Predictive Control (MPC). A linear dynamic model is used to describe the evolution of the health condition of a segment of the railway track. The hybrid characteristics arise from the three possible control actions: performing no maintenance, performing corrective maintenan...

The optimal track allocation problem (OPTRA) is to find, in a given railway network, a conflict free set of train routes of maximum value. We study two types of integer programming formulations for this problem: a standard formulation that models block conflicts in terms of packing constraints, and a novel formulation of the ‘extended’ type that is based on additional ‘configuration’ variables....