Abstract
The railway crew scheduling problem with attendance rates is particularly relevant for the planning of conductors in German regional passenger transport. Its aim is to find a cost-minimal set of duties. In contrast to other crew scheduling problems, only a given percentage of trains has to be covered by personnel. As a result, existing solution approaches for this complex planning task often generate schedules in which the number of duties per day varies significantly. However, schedules with an uneven distribution are often not applicable in practice, as an proper assignment of duties to conductors becomes impossible. Therefore, we discuss several ways how an even distribution can be considered in a column generation solution method, namely post-processing and integrated approaches. In addition, the daily distribution is also examined for each depot, where a given number of conductors may be assigned to. In a case study the presented approaches are examined and compared for three real-world transportation networks. It is shown that without much additional computational effort and only a minor increase of costs schedules with evenly distributed duties can be gained. Especially the depot-based integrated approaches show promising results. Hence, this study can contribute to an improved applicability in practice of automated railway crew scheduling.
This research was supported by DB Regio AG.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abbink, E.J.W., Wout, J.V., Huisman, D.: Solving large scale crew scheduling problems by using iterative partitioning. In: Liebchen, C., Ahuja, R.K., Mesa, J.A. (eds.) 7th Workshop on Algorithmic Approaches for Transportation Modeling, Optimization, and Systems (ATMOS 2007). OASICS, vol. 7. Internationales Begegnungs- und Forschungszentrum fuer Informatik (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany (2007)
Artigues, C., Jozefowiez, N., Sarpong, B.M.: Column generation algorithms for bi-objective combinatorial optimization problems with a min-max objective. EURO J. Computat. Optimizat. 6(2), 117–142 (2018)
Chen, S., Shen, Y.: An improved column generation algorithm for crew scheduling problems. J. Inf. Computat. Sci. 10, 175–183 (2013)
Heil, J., Hoffmann, K., Buscher, U.: Railway crew scheduling: models, methods and applications. Euro. J. Oper. Res. 283(2), 405–425 (2020)
Hoffmann, K.: A hybrid solution approach for railway crew scheduling problems with attendance rates. In: Doerner, K.F., Ljubic, I., Pflug, G., Tragler, G. (eds.) Operations Research Proceedings 2015. ORP, pp. 243–250. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42902-1_33
Hoffmann, K., Buscher, U.: Valid inequalities for the arc flow formulation of the railway crew scheduling problem with attendance rates. Computers & Industrial Engineering (2018)
Hoffmann, K., Buscher, U., Neufeld, J.S., Tamke, F.: Solving practical railway crew scheduling problems with attendance rates. Bus. Inf. Syst. Eng. 59(3), 147–159 (2017)
Jütte, S., Albers, M., Thonemann, U.W., Haase, K.: Optimizing railway crew scheduling at db schenker. Interfaces 41(2), 109–122 (2011)
Jütte, S., Thonemann, U.W.: Divide-and-price: a decomposition algorithm for solving large railway crew scheduling problems. Euro. J. Oper. Res. 219(2), 214–223 (2012)
Lübbecke, M.E., Desrosiers, J.: Selected topics in column generation. Oper. Res. 53(6), 1007–1023 (2005)
Neufeld, J.S.: Efficient railway crew scheduling in german regional passenger transport. Impact 2019(2), 7–10 (2019)
Şahin, G., Yüceoğlu, B.: Tactical crew planning in railways. Transport. Res. Part E: Logistics Transport. Rev. 47(6), 1221–1243 (2011)
Vaidyanathan, B., Jha, K.C., Ahuja, R.K.: Multicommodity network flow approach to the railroad crew-scheduling problem. IBM J. Res. Dev. - Bus. optimizat. 51(3), 325–344 (2007)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Scheffler, M., Neufeld, J.S. (2020). Daily Distribution of Duties for Crew Scheduling with Attendance Rates: A Case Study. In: Lalla-Ruiz, E., Mes, M., Voß, S. (eds) Computational Logistics. ICCL 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12433. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59747-4_24
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59747-4_24
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-59746-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-59747-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)