The Divide-and-Price Decomposition Algorithm

Abstract

As shown in the previous chapter, crew scheduling applications are able to generate high quality solutions with a runtime of several hours to a few days even for large problem instances of about 20, 000 trips. Such runtimes are acceptable for most medium-term planning problems, where crew schedules are generated several weeks or months before operation. For some practical settings, though, the benefit of these algorithms is limited: Firstly, some medium-term problem instances consist of more than 50, 000 trips. In these dimensions, the runtime of the crew scheduling algorithm of Chapter 3 is too long to be of practical use.