Line 05
Maintenance windows and capacity recovery
The window is the scarce resource. Allocates interventions against the real circulation grid and translates maintenance into capacity: headway, transit time and volume.
Context
Headway is the interval between trains — the metric that defines how many a line can carry. Every intervention consumes capacity while it happens and returns capacity afterwards. The balance between the two is the calculation almost nobody makes explicitly.
When the window is treated as an administrative constraint, maintenance becomes a dispute with operations and the outcome is settled by hierarchy. When it is treated as a scarce resource with a price, the same decision gains a criterion: which intervention, in which window, returns the most capacity per hour of track occupied.
The work connects the maintenance queue to the real circulation grid — not to nominal line capacity — and returns the window plan alongside its expected effect on transit time and on volume carried in the period.
What you get
What you get
Real capacity reading
Practised capacity by section from the effective schedule and current restrictions, separating physical limits from planning limits.
Capacity cost of the window
What each hour of occupied track costs in trains not run, so window allocation stops being negotiation and becomes calculation.
Window plan by corridor
Prioritised interventions allocated against the real grid, grouped by section to reduce the number of blockages.
Transit time effect
Translation of the maintenance plan into expected variation in transit time and volume — the language in which operations directors decide.
When this applies
Situations in which this line of work is the right starting point.
- Maintenance and circulation compete for the same window and hierarchy settles it.
- Declared nominal capacity does not match what the network delivers.
- A corridor has a volume target and maintenance is seen purely as cost.
- An intervention plan exists but has never been confronted with the real grid.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Is this a traffic control system?
No. Signalling, traffic control and any operational safety system are explicitly out of Headway’s scope. This work is maintenance planning against existing circulation.
Can it run without the platform?
Yes. It is a fixed-scope engineering project and runs standalone. Inside a Track implementation it feeds from the prioritisation automatically.
Related services
Maintenance data integration
Brings ERP/EAM, inspection cars, testing, telemetry and field records into a single asset model — with the history reconciled, not merely transported.
See service 07Rail–terminal interface
The wagon cycle does not end at the destination yard. Measures arrival, shunting, positioning, loading and release with the same ruler used for track time.
See serviceNext step
How much of your maintenance budget is well allocated?
The conversation starts with the problem, not the platform: which decision is made today without enough data, and what the order of magnitude would be if it improved. Thirty minutes, no corporate deck.