Decision support for crew rostering at NS

Abstract

This paper describes a method for solving the cyclic crewrostering problem (CCRP). This is the problem of cyclicallyordering a set of duties for a number of crew members, such thatseveral complex constraints are satisfied and such that thequality of the obtained roster is as high as possible. Thedescribed method was tested on a number of instances of NS, thelargest operator of passenger trains in the Netherlands. Theseinstances involve the generation of rosters for groups of traindrivers or conductors of NS. The tests show that high qualitysolutions for practical instances of the CCRP can be generated inan acceptable amount of computing time. Finally, we describe anexperiment where we constructed rosters in an automatic way for agroup of conductors. They preferred our - generated - rosters overtheir own manually constructed rosters.