Simulation-based optimization of personnel assignment in railway nodes

Operational management of railway nodes, such as marshalling yards or maintenance depots, is important to ensure the efficient operation of the whole railway transportation system. Due to the nature of the railway operation, many tasks in such systems have to be performed by dispatchers. This paper proposes methods that could provide support for operational management carried out by dispatchers, namely the allocation of personnel to individual work tasks. A mathematical optimization model was designed for these needs. To lower the computational time required for the optimization, an algorithm combining simulation and optimization method is proposed, in which the optimization is performed on the reduced state space. The usefulness of proposed approach has been verified using simulation model of an existing railway maintenance depot.