Solving Large Scale Crew Scheduling Problems in Practice

Erwin Abbink, L. Albino, Twan Dollevoet, Dennis Huisman (), J. Roussado and Ricardo Saldanha

No EI 2010-63, Econometric Institute Research Papers from Erasmus University Rotterdam, Erasmus School of Economics (ESE), Econometric Institute

Abstract: 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 guards. Some labor rules restrict the duties of a certain crew base over the complete week. Therefore splitting the problem in several subproblems per day leads to suboptimal solutions. In this paper, we present an algorithm, called LUCIA, which can solve such huge instances without splitting. This algorithm combines Lagrangian heuristics, column generation and fixing techniques. We compare the results with existing practice. The results show that the new method significantly improves the solution.

Keywords: column generation; crew scheduling; large-scale optimization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-12-07
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

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