Integrated Crew Scheduling and Roster Problem for Trainmasters of Passenger Railway Transportation

Abstract

Train crew management is an imperative task in a passenger railway system and is typically decomposed into two sub-problems: crew scheduling problem and crew rostering problem. The decomposition can make the problem easier to solve but may produce degraded solutions. In this paper, we propose a formulation to integrate these two critical sub-problems and develop a branch-and-price-and-cut algorithm and a depth-first search-based algorithm to solve the composite problem. The numerical results show that an integrated framework can yield better solutions than the decomposition strategy. Furthermore, results also show that the rostering constraints have a more notable effect on the results compared with the scheduling constraints in the integrated framework. This type of observation can only be accurately characterized when these two sub-problems are considered in an integrated manner.

Keywords

• Crew scheduling
• crew rostering
• staff management
• branch-and-price-and-cut
• rail transport