Solving Large Scale Crew Scheduling Problems by using Iterative Partitioning

This paper deals with large-scale crew scheduling problems arising at the Dutch railway operator, Netherlands Railways (NS). We discuss several methods to partition large instances into several smaller ones. These smaller instances are then solved with the commercially available crew scheduling algorithm TURNI. In this paper, we compare several partitioning methods with each other. Moreover, we report some results where we applied different partitioning methods after each other. With this approach, we were able to cut crew costs with 2% (about 6 million euro per year).

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ATMOS
• Authors: Erwin J. W. Abbink, Joel Van't Wout, Dennis Huisman
• Keywords: ATMOS 2007, Crew Scheduling, Large-scale Crew Scheduling, Optimization, Partitioning Methods