Lecture 1:
Crew Scheduling
by Professor Dennis Huisman, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Nederlands
Lecture description: Crew (train drivers, train guards) is one of the main resources to operate a railway system, and especially in Western countries it is becoming a scarce resource due to the tense labor market. In this mini course, mathematical models and algorithms for various crew scheduling problems are discussed.
First, we will look at the (tactical) crew scheduling problem, where the goal is to find a crew schedule with the least costs that operates all trains and satisfies all labor rules. We will illustrate this problem with a practical application at Netherlands Railways (NS), the largest railway operator in the Netherlands. At NS, a fair division of the work among the different crew members is an important element of the labor rules and this leads to complex, large-scale optimization problems, which require advanced solution approaches such as column generation.
Afterwards, we will present a new, innovative concept of “fairness over time” to distribute both the attractive work and the less popular work in a fair way over the different crew members. We present modeling ideas, a solution approach, and computational results. In the latter, we show that over a period of time all crew members have a similar amount of attractive and less popular work.
Finally, we will discuss the crew rescheduling problem in the context of disruption management. In railways, there are always unexpected events such as infrastructure malfunctioning or broken rolling stock unit, resulting in adjusted schedules on the day of operation. In such cases, the crew schedules need to be adjusted in a few minutes. We will discuss a solution approach how to tackle these problems and illustrate it with real-world examples at NS.
About lecturer: Dennis Huisman is a part-time professor Public Transport Optimization at the Econometric Institute, Erasmus School of Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam. His current research focuses on Operations Research models and techniques that can support the planning and operations of a railway operator in relation to complex logistical issues. He combines his role at Erasmus University Rotterdam with that of expertise manager logistic processes at Netherlands Railways, the largest passenger railway operator in the Netherlands.
Dennis Huisman was a member of Netherlands Railways team that won the Franz Edelman Award, also known as the Super Bowl of Operations Research, in 2008. He obtained his PhD from Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2004. His PhD thesis dealt with integrated and dynamic vehicle and crew scheduling.
