Railway Track Maintenance Scheduling using Artificial Bee Colony and Harmony Search

The objective of this paper is to propose a heuristic algorithm to optimize the railway track maintenance scheduling, a NP-hard problem, by reflecting conditions of the actual field more quickly and easily. We develop the mechanism based on Binary Artificial Bee Colony (BABC) and Binary Harmony Search (BHS), and verify their performance through simulation experiments. Our proposed BABC and BHS mechanisms were applied to problems composed of 30, 60, 100, and 200 operations for railway track maintenance scheduling to carry out experiments and analysis. On comparing it with the results solved by CPLEX, it is found that the mechanism could present an optimal solution within limited time by user.