A stochastic programming approach to the railcar maintenance problem with service level and track capacity considerations

Official URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11590-026-02326-5

Railcars, as part of the rolling stock, perform regular transportation tasks with respect to a service level agreement (SLA) and undergo preventive maintenance at regular intervals based on the recommendations of train manufacturers. When unexpected failures occur, they need to enter corrective maintenance immediately. However, this reactive approach may result in large SLA violations and an excessive number of corrective maintenance actions. In this study, we utilize a predictive maintenance strategy based on the reliability of a railcar. In particular, we propose a stochastic programming model, in which railcar failure scenarios are generated from a Weibull distribution, a common assumption in the reliability literature. The model incorporates both SLA and track-capacity considerations and is solved through the Sample Average Approximation (SAA) method. We generate random instances to compare the stochastic model, a deterministic model adopted from the literature and a practical heuristic with respect to several system parameters. Our results show that the stochastic model achieves lower total costs, fewer SLA violations, and a reduced number of corrective interventions compared to two deterministic models and a heuristic approach, while effectively managing track-capacity constraints. Our results underscore the importance of the predictive approach in the context of the railcar maintenance problem.