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

Abstract

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

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