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

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

Scheduling train crews: a case study for the Dutch Railways

In this paper the problem of scheduling train crew is considered. We discuss a general framework of which the method for solving the train crew scheduling problem is a special case. In particular, our method is a heuristic branch-and-price algorithm suitable for large scale crew scheduling problems. This algorithm is applied to a real life train guard scheduling problem which is provided to us by the Dutch Railways. Computational results show that our algorithm is capable of getting sub-optimal solutions for a large scale instance within reasonable computation time

Railway timetable generation

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc

Analysis of railway stations by means of interval timed coloured Petri nets

In this paperinterval timed coloured Petri nets ((van der Aalst, 1993)) are used to model and analyse railway stations. We will show that this approach can be used to evaluate both station operating schedules and the infrastructure of a station. An interval timed coloured Petri net (ITCPN) is a coloured Petri net extended with time; time is in tokens and transitions determine a delay for each produced token. This delay is specified by an upper and lower bound, i.e. an interval. The ITCPN model allows for the modelling of the dynamic behaviour of large and complex systems, without loosing the possibility of formal analysis. In addition to the existing analysis techniques for coloured Petri nets, we use a new analysis method to analyse the temporal behaviour of the net. This method constructs a reduced reachability graph and exploits the fact that delays are described by an interval. We will also discuss other (Petri net based) methods that can be used to analyse railway stations

A note on the ratio of the extreme to the root of the sum of squares in sequences of absolute values of Gaussian variables

Let Z1, ..., Zn be i.i.d. standard normal variables, Mn the extreme among their absolute values, and Qn their rooted sum of squares. Here we study the ratio ?n =Mn /Qn. We show that ?(?n ) = ?(Mn )/?(Qn )~ bn / Vn ~ V2log(n)/n, where cn ~ dn denotes that cn /dn ?1 for n??. Moreover, convergence happens in a stable manner, i.e. ?n ~ ?(?n ) in probability. For low dimensions we also derive explicit expressions for ?(?n ) and variance ? 2 (?n ) . These expressions are calculated by using an appealing geometrical interpretation of ?n.Values and TechnologyTechnology, Policy and Managemen