Mathematical model for the maintenance activities scheduling in the case of railway remanufacturing systems

In the railway technical centers, scheduling the maintenance activities is a very complex task, it consists in ordering, in the time, all the maintenance operations on the workstations, while respecting the number of resources, precedence constraints, and the workstations' availabilities. Currently, this process is not completely automatic. For improving this situation, this paper presents a mathematical model for the maintenance activities scheduling in the case of railway remanufacturing systems. The studied problem is modeled as a flexible job-shop, with the possibility for a job to be executed several times on a stage. MILP formulation is implemented with the Makespan as an objective, representing the time for remanufacturing the train. The aim is to create a generic model for optimizing the planning of the maintenance activities and improving the performance of the railway technical centers. Finally, experimental results are discussed, analyzing the impact of the instances size on the CPU time.