Coach cleaning operations planning in railway management

In the daily management of regional railways companies, one of the problems they have to deal with is to decide, everyday, the cleaning policy (that is, which units should be cleaned, what kind of cleaning should be done to the units, and when to do them in order to maximize the efficiency). This decision has a big impact on the service quality perceived by the passengers. In this paper we discuss the use of IT for this purpose. We present a MILP model to define the most adequate cleaning operations for daily decision making, using a scheduling algorithm for sequencing the operations previously chosen, in order to guarantee the needed resources when executing the solution. These procedures have been implemented in the regional network of Asturias of the Spanish National Railway Company.