Weekly scheduling for freight rail engineers & trainmen

Jia Guo and Jonathan F. Bard

Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, 2024, vol. 183, issue C

Abstract: Standard practice in the freight rail industry has been used to provide only short-term crew schedules for a day or two at a time. This essentially means that the engineers and other trainmen function on a “just-in-time” basis with as little as two hours notice to report to work. This approach offers the greatest flexibility for management but plays havoc with the work-life balance of the crew. The purpose of this paper is to show that it is possible to construct robust weekly schedules that satisfy the full range of legal regulations and company policies without greatly enlarging the size of the workforce. This is done with a 3-phase algorithm that relies on the logic of column generation and local improvement procedures. Additional features include the option to generate cyclic schedules and a parametric approach to account for random trip times. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the methodology, computational experiments and statistical analysis are conducted using data sets from a Class I railroad. The robustness of the derived schedules is confirmed through simulation with varied parameter settings by comparing each of the baseline schedules produced by the 3-phase algorithm with 100 random instances.

Keywords: Freight rail crew scheduling; Column generation; Random travel times; Robust schedules; Parametric analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191261524000663
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:transb:v:183:y:2024:i:c:s0191261524000663

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
https://shop.elsevie ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.trb.2024.102942

Access Statistics for this article

Transportation Research Part B: Methodological is currently edited by Fred Mannering

More articles in Transportation Research Part B: Methodological from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().