Browsing by Author "Cillie, Dewald"
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- ItemDevelopment of a maintenance possession scheduler for a railway(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2022-04) Cillie, Dewald; Bekker, James F.ENGLISH SUMMARY: Maintenance of rail infrastructure is an important element in rail operations in order to keep tra c moving. However, maintenance causes infrastructure to be taken out of service, which impacts tra c ow. In this study, the requirements of a maintenance possession scheduler for a South African application was investigated, and a proposed solution was subsequently developed. The main objective of the scheduler was to minimise the deviation of the train service on a subset of rail infrastructure while ensuring that the required maintenance is done. To achieve this, a literature study was done on a number of themes, which include an overview of the local railway operator with a look at the role of industrial engineering as a function in the railway operator business, railway infrastructure and operations, planning of railway operations, and maintenance in the context of rail operations. The topic of possession scheduling was then studied; the previous themes helped the researcher to learn the bigger picture while understanding possession scheduling is critical for this study. Past and recent works were studied and research areas and trends were synthesised, including time span of possession scheduling in optimisation models, and whether it was done on microscopic, mesoscopic or macroscopic level. The various optimisation objectives formulated by researchers were also noted, among other subthemes. An application case was identi ed as the railway infrastructure between Bellville and Wellington in the Western Cape province of South Africa. A novel mixed-integer linear programming model was formulated for this case and implemented in Cplex, after which it was validated. The model can do possession scheduling for 24 hours on a microscopic level. Finally, several experiments were conducted to investigate the performance and results of the model. It was found that the model delivered optimal results in less than eight minutes, which makes it a feasible maintenance possession scheduler for day-to-day work in the immediate planning horizon.