A metaheuristic approach to optimize maintenance productivity of Indian railway coach and bogie

Indian Railways being one of the largest functioning units of India employs a huge amount of manual unorganized labor. Maintenance of railway coaches and bogies is provided from part of this labor. It has always been a great challenge to find an optimal operating scenario for maximized productivity. In this work, we aimed to model and maximize maintenance productivity of Indian Railway coach and bogie. Taking into consideration the volatility of the circumstances and uncorrelated behavior of different human factors affecting productivity, to obtain the best scenario five of the most critical human factors were identified that are expected to affect the maintenance of the coaches and bogies most. Cobb-Douglas production function was used to model maintenance productivity with the chosen human factors. The main goal after designing the model for productivity is to maximize it. To get the optimal productivity Differential Evolution algorithm is used. Finally, the Cuckoo search algorithm is applied to validate the results.