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Algorithms for railway crew management

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Abstract

Crew management is concerned with building the work schedules of crews needed to cover a planned timetable. This is a well-known problem in Operations Research and has been historically associated with airlines and mass-transit companies. More recently, railway applications have also come on the scene, especially in Europe. In practice, the overall crew management problem is decomposed into two subproblems, called crew scheduling and crew rostering. In this paper, we give an outline of different ways of modeling the two subproblems and possible solution methods. Two main solution approaches are illustrated for real-world applications. In particular we discuss in some detail the solution techniques currently adopted at the Italian railway company, Ferrovie dello Stato SpA, for solving crew scheduling and rostering problems.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. DEIS, University of Bologna, Italy

    Alberto Caprara, Paolo Toth & Daniele Vigo

  2. DMI, University of Udine, Italy

    Matteo Fischetti

  3. Ferrovie dello Stato SpA, Italy

    Pier Luigi Guida

Authors
  1. Alberto Caprara
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  2. Matteo Fischetti
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  3. Paolo Toth
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  4. Daniele Vigo
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  5. Pier Luigi Guida
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Caprara, A., Fischetti, M., Toth, P. et al. Algorithms for railway crew management. Mathematical Programming 79, 125–141 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02614314

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02614314

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