Optimizing Urban Train Maintenance
CEE Professor Haris Koutsopoulos and PhD student John Moody, civil and environmental engineering, published a paper, “Strategies To Optimize the Deployment of Roadway Maintenance Machines for Overnight Maintenance in Urban Rail Systems,” in the Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board. The researchers developed multiple models to optimize the maintenance window of urban transit systems without disrupting passenger service, one of which shaves travel times for maintenance vehicles by an average of 23 minutes.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Cyrus Moulton. Main photo: Researchers at Northeastern University partnered with the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority to optimize the time available for construction work. Photo by AJ Mast via AP Images
How Northeastern researchers are cutting valuable minutes off urban train maintenance with new strategies
Most urban transit systems have a brief window of time in the wee hours of the morning to perform maintenance work without disrupting passenger service.
Researchers from Northeastern University have developed multiple models to optimize this window, one of which shaves travel times for maintenance vehicles by an average of 23 minutes.
“Every minute counts,” says Northeastern PhD candidate John Moody.
His adviser, Haris Koutsopoulos, agrees.
“Twenty-three minutes may not sound like a huge amount of time, but it’s important to look at it as a percentage of the average time they have every night, which at the time was around 90 95 to 100 minutes to do the job,” says Koutsopoulos, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the Transit Mobility Lab at Northeastern.
The Transit Mobility Lab partners with the MIT Transit Lab and transit agencies across the country on research projects, including the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority in Washington, D.C., the Chicago Transit Authority.
In the lab’s latest research, published in the journal Transportation Research Record, researchers partnered with the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority to address how to optimize the maintenance time available for a system that provides passenger service 19 hours per weekday.
“It’s a good example of what Northeastern preaches in experiential learning,” Moody says. “We seek to understand the practical issues to be addressed, and we apply them to real world scenarios—it’s not just theory.”
Most often that maintenance time occurs early in the morning when passenger service is suspended.
But Moody and Koutsopoulos say it’s rarely as simple as driving to a worksite with your tools at hand, ready to go.
“It’s not an easy environment to work in at night,” Koutsopoulos says.
For instance, job sites are often underground and accessible only by rail—and some parts of the labyrinthine rail network are easier to get to than others. Maintenance machines (work trains) also need to get to the worksite.
Read full story at Northeastern Global News