Railway Crew Scheduling Based on Step by Step Optimization and Graph Partitioning

—Application to Large-scale and Complex Railway Route—

Abstract

A railway crew scheduling problem is an assignment problem of crews for a given operational schedule under the constraint on labor regulations. In this paper, we discuss an automatic railway crew scheduling method based on numerical optimization for a large-scale and complex railway route with branch lines and multiple bases. The proposed method makes the crew schedule automatically using step by step optimization based on a partial pairing, an elastic embedded set partitioning problem and a graph partitioning.