trafIT Maintenance Optimization

With a length of 57 km the Gotthard-Base-Tunnel is the longest railway tunnel in the world. Unlike other even shorter tunnels it has no separate service tunnel additional to the two highspeed rail tunnels. The sheer size of the structure, the number of equipment and the limited access for maintenance works makes it necessary to optimize maintenance planning and realization.

Swiss Federal Railways (SBB-I) therefore asked trafIT solutions to develop a solution to automaticly generate the best maintenance timetable. Called TreMOla (abbr. for Tunnel Maintenance Optimization and the name of the old cobbled road mountain pass over the Gotthard), this tool calculates the optimal combination of operational procedures to maximize productivity for any given combination of maintenance works.

With an  early prototype trafIT prooved the feasibility of such an approach. As a second step trafIT realized the integration of TreMOla into the ressource planning tool REAL-GBT together with SBB-IT. REAL-GBT is a SAP-based system managing all ressources in the context of maintaining the Gotthard Baase Tunnel and generates the scripts for each maintenance shift based on TreMOla-input.TreMOla now is implemented as a web-service based on Java 7, communication with REAL-GBT is done via an xml-interface.

The main functionalities of TreMOla:

• receiving of input data (job sites for maintenance works, vehicles, infrastructure) and calculation parameters
• running time calculation of every possible combination of maintenance trains
• identification of the optimal timetable
• definition of processes in the preparation of maintenance works (section blocking, catenary switching, axle counter resets, ....)
• definition of ETCS-modes and traction-modes
• export of the timetable to REAL-GBT with all necessary information