A novel model and solution algorithm to improve crew scheduling in railway transportation: A real world case study

Abstract

This paper presents a novel mathematical formulation in railway crew scheduling, considering real challenges most European passenger railway companies face like roundtrip policy for crew members joining from different cities and stricter working time standards. To solve the problem in large scales of data (consistent with the real case size of the planning problems solved by rail transport companies), a solution algorithm is proposed. The algorithm includes two steps: I. Duty generation: pre-calculations to obtain all duties meeting the related constraints; II. Duty assignment: running the optimization model to select an optimal set of duties while satisfying other constraints. To investigate the algorithm’s efficiency, numerical test instances and a real case study have been employed. In addition, the savings that an implementation of the proposed approach allows to achieve instead of the manually prepared plans still applied in a lot of transportation companies are demonstrated. Results show that the proposed model and algorithm lead to considerable improvement compared to the original planning.