Research on Maintenance Efficiency Optimization for the Catenary System of Electrified Railways

Traditional preventive maintenance schemes for catenary systems of electrified railways are mainly formulated by on-site managers with reference to previous maintenance records and experience. With the increase of the maintenance workload of catenary systems, traditional maintenance schemes have been unable to meet the highly efficient requirements for on-site maintenance strategies. In view of this, a maintenance efficiency optimization method is proposed. According to the sequence of maintenance work of catenary systems, the workflow model of catenary maintenance work is established. Then, by taking the maintenance resources as constraints and the shortest completion time of maintenance tasks as the optimization objective, the optimal allocation model of catenary system maintenance resources is established. Finally, the differential evolution algorithm is used to obtain the optimal maintenance scheme. Based on the field data of a railway bureau in China, the maintenance scheme of the catenary systems is optimized. The results show that this method can greatly improve the maintenance efficiency of the catenary systems compared with the on-site maintenance scheme, and can provide decision support for the formulation of the catenary system maintenance scheme.