CHINESE POSTMAN PROBLEM APPROACH FOR A LARGE-SCALE CONVENTIONAL RAIL NETWORK IN TURKEY

Every year, railways are inspected periodically to examine the status of rail tracks and ensure the safety of train operations of the railroad networks in Turkey. These inspection projects must be performed by several specialized machines with large and expensive equipment. Finding the optimum route of inspection machines that control through travelling all lines is critically important in terms of cost and distance. In current practice, determining the route of these machines is largerly manual and primarily relies on the knowledge and judgment of experts. This paper proposes Chinese Postman Problem (CPP) to solve the inspection machine routing problem. The objective is to minimize the total travel distance on the railroads by finding the shortest route. The proposed model is applied to a large-scale real world problem. Compared to the current practice the proposed approach significantly outperforms the reduced objective value by 20,76%.