In this paper we discuss several methods to solve large real-world
instances of the vehicle and crew scheduling problem. Although,
there has been an increased attention to integrated approaches for
solving such problems in the literature, currently only small or
medium-sized instances can be solved by such approaches.
Therefore, large instances should be split into several smaller
ones, which can be solved by an integrated approach, or the
sequential approach, i.e. first vehicle scheduling and afterwards
crew scheduling, is applied.
In this paper we compare both approaches, where we consider
different ways of splitting an instance varying from very simple
rules to more sophisticated ones. Those ways are extensively
tested by computational experiments on real-world data provided by
the largest Dutch bus company
