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

• DOI: 10.1007/s10951-012-0284-y
• Publication Date: 2012-09-13T16:18:13Z
• Authors: Natashia Boland; Thomas Kalinowski; Hamish Waterer; Lanbo Zheng
• Keywords: Time horizon; Solver

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).