Crew Rostering for the High Speed Train

At the time of writing we entered the final stage of implementing the crew rostering system Harmony CDR to facilitate the planning of catering crews on board of the Thalys, the High Speed Train connecting Paris, Cologne, Brussels, Amsterdam, and Geneva. Harmony CDR optimally supports the creation of crew rosters in two ways. Firstly, Harmony CDR contains a powerful algorithm to automatically generate a set of rosters, which is especially developed for this specific situation. As the user has some control over the objectives of the algorithm, several scenarios can be studied before a set of rosters is adopted. An important feature of the automatic roster generator is that it respects requirements, directives, and requests stemming from legal, union, and/or company regulations and/or from individual crew. Secondly, Harmony CDR provides user-interface data manipulation at various levels of detail. The user interface enables the planner to easily obtain many different views on the planning data and to manipulate the planning manually. So again, the planner gets optimal support from the system while he or she is still in control. Also, violating a requirement, directive, or request is detected and displayed, but can be accepted by the planner. In this paper we describe the crew rostering problem for the catering crews of the High Speed Train and the Harmony CDR solution in more detail.decision support systems;railways;crew rostering

A decomposition approach to the integrated vehicle-crew-rostering problem

The problem addressed in this paper is the integrated vehicle-crew-rostering problem (VCRP) aiming to define the schedules for the buses and the rosters for the drivers of a public transit company. The VCRP is described by a bi-objective mixed binary linear programming model with one objective function aggregating vehicle and crew scheduling costs and the other the rostering features. The VCRP is solved by a heuristic approach based on Benders decomposition where the master problem is partitioned into daily integrated vehicle-crew scheduling problems and the sub-problem is a rostering problem. Computational experience with data from a bus company in Lisbon shows the ability of the decomposition approach for producing a variety of potentially efficient solutions for the VCRP within low computing times

Solving Public Transit Scheduling Problems

Operational planning within public transit companies has been extensively tackled but still remains a challenging area for operations research models and techniques. This phase of the planning process comprises vehicle scheduling, crew scheduling and rostering problems. In this paper, a new integer mathematical formulation to describe the integrated vehicle-crew-rostering problem is presented. The method proposed to solve this multi-objective problem is a sequential algorithm considered within a preemptive goal programming framework that starts from the solution of an integrated vehicle and crew scheduling problem and ends with the solution of a driver rostering problem. Feasible solutions for the vehicle and crew scheduling problem are obtained by combining a column generation scheme with a branch-and-bound method. These solutions are the input of the rostering problem, which is tackled through a mixed binary linear programming approach. An application to real data of a Portuguese bus company is reported and shows the importance of integrating the three scheduling problems

A decision support system for crew planning in passenger transportation using a flexible branch-and-price algorithm

This paper discusses a decision support system for airline and railway crew planning. The system is a state-of-the-art branch-and-price solver that is used for crew scheduling and crew rostering. We briefly discuss the mathematical background of the solver, of which most part is covered in the Operations Research literature. Crew scheduling is crew planning for one or a few days that results in crew duties or pairings, and crew rostering is crew planning for at least one week for individual crew members. Technical issues about the system and its implementation are covered in more detail, as well as several applications. In particular, we focus on

Crew Rostering for the High Speed Train

At the time of writing we entered the final stage of implementing the crew rostering system Harmony CDR to facilitate the planning of catering crews on board of the Thalys, the High Speed Train connecting Paris, Cologne, Brussels, Amsterdam, and Geneva. Harmony CDR optimally supports the creation of crew rosters in two ways. Firstly, Harmony CDR contains a powerful algorithm to automatically generate a set of rosters, which is especially developed for this specific situation. As the user has some control over the objectives of the algorithm, several scenarios can be studied before a set of rosters is adopted. An important feature of the automatic roster generator is that it respects requirements, directives, and requests stemming from legal, union, and/or company regulations and/or from individual crew. Secondly, Harmony CDR provides user-interface data manipulation at various levels of detail. The user interface enables the planner to easily obtain many different views on the planning data and to manipulate the planning manually. So again, the planner gets optimal support from the system while he or she is still in control. Also, violating a requirement, directive, or request is detected and displayed, but can be accepted by the planner. In this paper we describe the crew rostering problem for the catering crews of the High Speed Train and the Harmony CDR solution in more detail

Is Equality always desirable?

In this paper, we analyze the trade-off between perceived fairness and perceived attractiveness in crew rostering. First, we introduce the Fairness-oriented Crew Rostering Problem. In this problem, attractive cyclic rosters have to be constructed, while respecting a pre-specified fairness level. Then, we propose a flexible mathematical formulation, able to exploit problem specific knowledge, and develop an exact Branch-Price-and-Cut solution method. The solution method combines Branch-and-Bound with column generation, where profitable columns are separated by solving resource constrained shortest path problems with surplus variables. We also derive a set of valid inequalities to tighten the formulation. Finally, we demonstrate the benefit of our approach on practical instances from Netherlands Railways, the largest passenger railway operator in the Netherlands. We are able to construct the explicit trade-off curve between fairness and attractiveness and show that a sequential approach can lead to suboptimal results. In particular, we show that focusing solely on fairness leads to rosters that are disproportionally less attractive. Furthermore, this decrease in attractiveness is heavily skewed towards the most exible employees. Thus, in order to generate truly fair rosters, the explicit trade-off between fairness and attractiveness should be considered