Decision support for crew rostering at NS

This paper describes a method for solving the cyclic crew rostering problem (CCRP). This is the problem of cyclically ordering a set of duties for a number of crew members, such that several complex constraints are satisfied and such that the quality of the obtained roster is as high as possible. The described method was tested on a number of instances of NS, the largest operator of passenger trains in the Netherlands. These instances involve the generation of rosters for groups of train drivers or conductors of NS. The tests show that high quality solutions for practical instances of the CCRP can be generated in an acceptable amount of computing time. Finally, we describe an experiment where we constructed rosters in an automatic way for a group of conductors. They preferred our—generated—rosters over their own manually constructed rosters

Real-time train driver rescheduling by actor-agent techniques

Passenger railway operations are based on an extensive planning process for generating the timetable, the rolling stock circulation, and the crew duties for train drivers and conductors. In particular, crew scheduling is a complex process. After the planning process has been completed, the plans are carried out in the real-time operations. Preferably, the plans are carried out as scheduled. However, in case of delays of trains or large disruptions of the railway system, the timetable, the rolling stock circulation and the crew duties may not be feasible anymore and must be rescheduled. This paper presents a method based on multi-agent techniques to solve the train driver rescheduling problem in case of a large disruption. It assumes that the timetable and the rolling stock have been rescheduled already based on an incident scenario. In the crew rescheduling model, each train driver is represented by a driver-agent. A driver-agent whose duty has become infeasible by the disruption starts a recursive task exchange process with the other driver-agents in order to solve this infeasibility. The task exchange process is supported by a route-analyzer-agent, which determines whether a proposed task exchange is feasible, conditionally feasible, or not feasible. The task exchange process is guided by several cost parameters, and the aim is to find a feasible set of duties at minimal total cost. The train driver rescheduling method was tested on several realistic disruption instances of Netherlands Railways (NS), the main operator of passenger trains in the Netherlands. In general the rescheduling method finds an appropriate set of rescheduled duties in a short amount of time. This research was carried out in close cooperation by NS and the D-CIS Lab