Multi-agent routing and scheduling for railway track inspection

This thesis explores innovative solutions for complex railway routing and scheduling challenges. Inspired by the problem of inspecting railway tracks using multiple instrumented wagons, the research identifies a few real-world routing and scheduling problems, formulates them in optimization frameworks, and develops novel variants of the state-of-the-art algorithms to solve them. This research yields optimal or near-optimal solutions for the optimization problems, ensuring efficient resource utilization and on-time operations. These findings have practical implications for enhancing railway transportation efficiency and resilience.