This paper deals with large-scale crew scheduling problems arising
at the Dutch railway operator, Netherlands Railways (NS). NS
opera

Abbink, E.J.W. (Erwin)

This paper deals with large-scale crew scheduling problems arising
at the Dutch railway operator, Netherlands Railways (NS). NS
operates about 30,000 trains a week. All these trains need a driver
and a certain number of conductors. No available crew scheduling
algorithm can solve such huge instances at once. A common approach
to deal with these huge weekly instances, is to split them into
several daily instances and solve those separately. However, we
found out that this can be rather inefficient.

In this paper, we discuss several methods to partition huge
instances into several smaller ones. These smaller instances are
then solved with the commercially available crew scheduling
algorithm TURNI. We compare these partitioning methods with each
other, and we report several results where we applied different
partitioning methods after each other. The results show that all
methods significantly improve the solution. With the best approach,
we were able to cut down crew costs with about 2\\% (about 6 million
euro per year)

Solving large scale crew scheduling problems by using iterative partitioning

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