Boland, Natashia

Kalinowski, Thomas

Waterer, Hamish

Zheng, Lanbo

2013-12

We consider the scheduling of the annual maintenance for the Hunter Valley Coal Chain. The coal chain is a system comprising load points, railway track and different types of terminal equipment, interacting in a complex way. A variety of maintenance tasks have to be performed on all parts of the infrastructure on a regular basis in order to assure the operation of the system as a whole. The main objective in the planning of these maintenance jobs is to maximize the total annual throughput. Based on a network flow model of the system, we propose a mixed integer programming formulation for this planning task. In order to deal with the resulting large scale model which cannot be solved directly by a general purpose solver, we propose two steps. The number of binary variables is reduced by choosing a representative subset of the variables of the original problem, and a rolling horizon approach enables the approximation of the long term (i.e. annual) problem by a sequence of shorter problems (for instance, monthly).

Journal of Scheduling, 16(6), p. 649-659

1099-1425

1094-6136

https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/26800

Springer New York LLC

Mixed integer programming based maintenance scheduling for the Hunter Valley coal chain

Journal Article

Publication