ALGORITHMS FOR RAILWAY CREW MANAGEMENT

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 cr ew 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 a pplications. In particular we discuss in some detail the solution tech niques currently adopted at the Italian railway company, Ferrovie dell o State SpA, for solving crew scheduling and rostering problems. (C) 1 997 The Mathematical Programming Society, Inc. Published by Elsevier S cience B.V.