New Ways in Vehicle and Crew Scheduling

Abstract

Vehicle and crew scheduling are two major planning problems arising in public bus transport companies. Briefly stated, these problems aim at assigning vehicle itineraries to scheduled trips and crews itineraries to tasks resulting from the vehicle schedule. The main objective of a vehicle and crew schedule is to offer a given service that allows passengers to travel easily at a low fare while minimizing asset and operating costs. Traditionally, both planning steps have been approached sequentially where vehicle schedules are determined before crew schedules. These processes have two main problems first they are not able to take into consideration of crew scheduling during vehicles scheduling, generally there is no loop back to the previous step, second they planning horizon is generally one day, although the crew scheduling of one day has effect on the next day due to labour rules.