Train crew management involves the development of a duty timetable for each of the drivers (crew) to cover a given train timetable in a rail transport organization. This duty timetable is spread over a certain period, known as the roster planning horizon. Train crew management may arise either from the planning stage, when the total number of crew and crew distributions are to be determined, or...

This paper studies the crew planning problem as observed in the transportation industry. We first survey the existing literature on crew scheduling applications in railways and airlines. Next, we identify the synergies in the two domains and propose new directions for railway crew scheduling inspired from the applications in airlines.

In the Dutch railway network, there are a few times per week modifications in the timetable necessary due to unexpected maintenance projects or planned maintenance project that finish later than expected. Moreover, there are about 20 disruptions per day on average. These disruptions can be caused by the infrastructure (e.g. broken switches, no power supply), the weather (e.g. longer braking tim...

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 ...

Crew members on cruise ships are hired in a global labor market, and a major cost for cruise lines is moving crewmembers from their home cities to the cruise ship’s departure port. Complicating the crew scheduling problem is the uncertainty due to no-shows, terminations, and other reasons for crew to terminate their contract prematurely. To address this problem, this paper describes a schedulin...

This paper discusses a decision support system for airline and railway crew planning. The system is a state-of-the-art branch-and-price solver that is used for crew scheduling and crew rostering. We briefly discuss the mathematical background of the solver, of which most part is covered in the Operations Research literature. Crew scheduling is crew planning for one or a few days that results in...

The ability to generate crew pairings quickly is essential to solving the airline crew scheduling problem. Although techniques for doing so are well-established, they are also highly customized and require significant implementation efforts. This greatly impedes researchers studying important problems such as robust planning, integrated planning, and automated recovery, all of which also requir...

The airline fleet assignment problem involves assigning aircrafts to flights to maximize profit. Different fleet assignment solutions cause dramatically different performance in subsequent crew planning and operational processes. We have developed an integrated fleet and crew robust planning method to provide fleet assignment solutions that are both friendly to crew planning and robust to real ...

We propose, optimize and validate a methodological framework for estimating the extent of the crewpropagated delays and disruptions (CPDD). We identify the factors that influence the extent of the CPDD, and incorporate them into a robust crew scheduling model. We develop a fast heuristic approach for solving the inverse of this robust crew scheduling problem to generate crew schedules that are ...

In this paper the ability to efficiently solve large crew scheduling problems on a network of workstations (NOW) is presented. Large crew scheduling problems from the Lufthansa set of problems have been solved with a near linear speedup on the generator component of the problem. The generator is the most time consuming component of the solution process, which implies that a significant improvem...