01763784

Component

https://doi.org/10.1177/03611981211036368

Crew scheduling is one of the crucial processes in railroad operation planning. Based on current regulations and working and break time requirements, as well as the operational rules, this process aims to find a duty arrangement with minimal cost that covers all trips. Most past studies considered this subject for railroad systems as an optimization problem and solved it with mathematical programming-based methods or heuristic algorithms, despite numerous logical constraints embedded in this problem. Few studies have applied constraint programming (CP) approaches to tackle the railroad crew scheduling problem. This paper proposes a hybrid approach to solve the problem with a CP model for duty generation, and an integer programming model for duty optimization. These models have been applied to the Kaohsiung depot of Taiwan Railways Administration, the largest railroad operator in Taiwan. The encouraging results show that the proposed approach is more efficient than the manual process and can achieve 30% savings of driver cost. Moreover, the approach is robust and provides flexibility to easily accommodate related operational concerns such as minimizing the number of overnight duties. Thus, this hybrid two-phase approach seems to have the potential for applications to the railroad crew scheduling problems outside Taiwan.

Jyh-Cherng Jong https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6382-7628 © National Academy of Sciences: Transportation Research Board 2021.

TRBAM-21-01120

English

0000-0001-6382-7628

0000-0003-4733-3876

pp 408-420

2022-1

Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board

Digital/other

Figures; Maps; References (25) ; Tables

Case studies; Integer programming; Optimization; Railroads; Scheduling; Shifts; Train crews

Taiwan Railway Administration (TRA)

Taiwan

Administration and Management; Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting; Railroads

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 23 2020 11:11AM