Railway infrastructure maintenance consumes very large budgets, is complicated to organize and has numerous challenging planning problems. Specifically, the coordination with train traffic operation is of crucial importance. Despite this, little work has been conducted in the operations research area regarding infrastructure maintenance as compared to train traffic operations.

The aim of this paper is to give a comprehensive overview of the railway infrastructure maintenance field, the planning problems it contains and the research that has been conducted so far. We present (i) a catalogue of planning problems, based on a series of interviews with experts and planners representing all major stake holders in Sweden and (ii) an extensive literature overview covering more than 60 research references published until 2014 regarding the use of mathematical methods and optimization for solving such planning problems. From this we extract some statistics and a mapping which identify the major lines of work as well as future research possibilities.

The Swedish Transport Administration is introducing a new regime, called maintenance windows, for allocating train free slots reserved for maintenance tasks on the railway infrastructure. In this paper, a model for the assessment and the dimensioning of such maintenance windows is presented, which considers marginal effects on both the maintenance cost and the expected train traffic demand. The aim is to establish quantitative measures that can be used for comparing conflicting capacity requests from infrastructure maintenance and traffic operations on railway networks. The model is demonstrated in a cost benefit analysis for a real life case study on the Swedish Northern Main Line.

Abstract Railway transportation systems are important for society and have many challenging and important planning problems. Train services as well as maintenance of a railway network need to be scheduled efficiently, but have mostly been treated as two separate planning problems. Since these activities are mutually exclusive they must be coordinated and should ideally be planned together. In this paper we present a mixed integer programming model for solving an integrated railway traffic and network maintenance problem. The aim is to find a long term tactical plan that optimally schedules train free windows sufficient for a given volume of regular maintenance together with the wanted train traffic. A spatial and temporal aggregation is used for controlling the available network capacity. The properties of the proposed model are analyzed and computational experiments on various synthetic problem instances are reported. Model extensions and possible modifications are discussed as well as future research directions.