Abstract
The use of automatic crew planning tools within the railway industry is now becoming wide-spread, thanks to new algorithm development and faster computers. An example is the large European railway Deutsche Bahn, which is using a commercial crew planning system developed by Jeppesen (formerly Carmen Systems). This paper focuses on the crew pairing problem that arises at major railways. Even though it is similar to the well-studied airline crew pairing problem, the size and complexity of the railway operation necessitates tailored optimization techniques. We show that a column generation approach to the pairing problem, which combines resource constraints, k-shortest path enumeration and label merging techniques, is able to heuristically solve a 7,000 leg pairing problem in less than a day.
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Bengtsson, L., Galia, R., Gustafsson, T., Hjorring, C., Kohl, N. (2007). Railway Crew Pairing Optimization. In: Geraets, F., Kroon, L., Schoebel, A., Wagner, D., Zaroliagis, C.D. (eds) Algorithmic Methods for Railway Optimization. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4359. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74247-0_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74247-0_6
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