Improvement of Column Generation Method for Railway Crew Scheduling Problems

Abstract

The railway crew scheduling problem is to determine the assignment of crews to each traveling task to minimize the number of crews satisfying set covering constraints. Column generation method is often applied to solve railway crew scheduling problems. In this paper, we propose dual inequalities for railway crew scheduling problems to reduce the number of iterations in the column generation method. Three types of dual inequalities are generated from railway timetable data and they are added to the restricted master problem. Computational results show the effectiveness of the proposed method compared with the conventional column generation method.