Railway crew capacity planning problem with connectivity of schedules

Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tre.2015.10.003

We study a tactical level crew capacity planning problem in railways which determines the minimum required crew size in a region while both feasibility and connectivity of schedules are maintained. We present alternative mathematical formulations which depend on network representations of the problem. A path-based formulation in the form of a set-covering problem along with a column-and-row generation algorithm is proposed. An arc-based formulation of the problem is solved with a commercial linear programming solver. The computational study illustrates the effect of schedule connectivity on crew capacity decisions and shows that arc-based formulation is a viable approach.