Bus maintenance systems and maintenance scheduling

This dissertation deals with the problem of scheduling bus maintenance activities. The scheduling of maintenance is viewed as the fifth component in the bus transit operations planning process. The other components include network route design, setting timetables, scheduling vehicles to trips, and assignment of drivers. This dissertation presents a mathematical programming approach to the problem. This approach takes as input a given daily operation schedule for all buses assigned to a depot along with available maintenance resources. It then attempts to design daily inspection and maintenance schedules for the buses which are due for inspection while minimizing the interruptions in daily bus operations schedule and maximizing the utilization of the maintenance facilities.;Several integer programming formulations are presented and different properties of the problem are discussed. Several small examples are offered and the computational results from solving the problem for a real-world size example are also introduced.;Two simulation programs are developed to compare the efficiency of the maintenance operation with and without scheduling. The results show the superiority of the system with maintenance scheduling over the system without it. The sensitivity of the proposed models results with respect to the models' parameters are examined by conducting numerous computational experiments and varying these parameters.;Several heuristic methods for solving the integer programming formulation of the maintenance scheduling problem are also introduced and tested. The results of solving the real world problems using the heuristic and exact methods are compared.