Railway infrastructure maintenance is of crucial importance in order to obtain a well functioning transportation system.
The actual maintenance work consists of a large amount of different activities, requiring considerable resources
and large budgets. The European countries are reported to allocate 15 - 25 billion EUR annually on maintenance and
renewals for a railway system consisting of about 300 000 km of track, half of which is electrified, giving an average
of 70 000 EUR per km track and year (see EIM-EFRTC-CER Working Group (2012)).
There is however an inherent conflict in deciding how to assign maintenance work slots and train operation paths
since these activities are mutually exclusive. This planning conflict becomes crucial on lines with high traffic density
and especially when network traffic demand and maintenance needs are increasing.