Workload balancing in trasporation crew scheduling

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1534409 (Table of Contents)

We focus on workload balancing in crew scheduling problems of transportation systems where deadheading (repositioning with no duty) of crew is also possible. The deadheading option could be just used unnecessarily for the sake of balancing the workload among team members. Existing works have only focused on systems where deadheading is not considered. The assignment of crew members to a sequence of duties in a finite planning horizon is determined in such a way that the allocation of the workload among the crew members is acceptably fair and almost equal when possible. This issue is a common planning phenomenon for also other type of duty scheduling and rostering processes where teams of crew members are in consideration such as hospitals and airlines. At the tactical level, the crew schedules are feasible with respect to various restrictions and regulations; yet, they may result in an imbalanced share of workloads among the crew. In addition, unbalanced crew schedules may also cause unavoidable over-time costs and result in unevenness with respect to time-based compensations. A solution approach based on a network flow formulation of the problem is developed. In addition, we develop a binary search method as an exact algorithm and a pool of conventional heuristic methods that modify the schedules by reallocating the duties without disrupting the feasibilities. We present the results of our computational experiments with well-known problem instances from the crew scheduling literature and data sets that are representative of largest crew region in Turkish State Railways.