Scheduling and facility design for transit railcar maintenance

This paper develops models to evaluate the operational efficiency of alternative designs for railcar maintenance facilities. The focus is on utilization of maintenance positions in shops where multiple cars are assigned to the same track, creating the possibility of blocking. The paper develops and evaluates two rules for assigning jobs to shop stalls, one based on utilizing stalls in tandem with inserted idle time and the other not using inserted idle time. The performance is evaluated as a function of the number of stalls per track and whether the track is one-ended or two-ended.