Integrated Overnight Train Scheduling and Maintenance Planning for High-Speed Railway Lines

Overnight high-speed trains are very popular and convenient for passengers in countries with a large territory like China. However, the overnight high-speed train operation inevitably conflicts with the regular evening maintenance. We focus on both overnight high-speed train scheduling and maintenance planning to eliminate the conflict. Because some of the daytime high-speed trains that run early in the morning or late in the evening also interact with overnight high-speed trains and maintenance, we also allow them to be to slightly rescheduled to improve both the quality of the overnight train timetable and the maintenance plan. Our integrated optimization problem is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming model, which can be solved efficiently by the commercial solver CPLEX. Finally, we validate our model on a large real-world case constructed based on the Beijing–Guangzhou high-speed railway line in China.