A critical review of operations research on the operation and maintenance of railway systems

The railway system plays a critical role in modern transportation networks. To ensure its sustainable and reliable operation, conducting efficient operation and maintenance becomes the utmost concern of practitioners. While a growing body of literature has investigated the optimal decision-making for railway system operation (e.g., timetabling, rolling stock scheduling, real-time planning) and maintenance (e.g., time-based, mileage-based, condition-based, opportunistic, and hybrid maintenance) under various settings, a systematic review of their interactions remains lacking. To this end, this paper comprehensively reviews the state-of-the-art research on the operation and maintenance of railway systems, categorizing the relevant literature into four primary research domains: railway system operation, maintenance, and joint operation and maintenance, and fault detection and diagnosis. Potential directions for future research are outlined, including the application of artificial intelligence, integration of multiple railway systems, human-machine collaboration, stochastic modeling of uncertainty and multi-source data acquisition and integration for decision-making in railway systems.