STUDY ON CREW SCHEDULING MODEL FOR THE PASSENGER DEDICATED LINE

Crew scheduling of the passenger dedicated line is the daily work plan of train attendants, and crew scheduling problem is one of the key problems of the train crew management. Considering the actual condition of China's railway and crew rules, a crew scheduling model is established in this paper to minimize rest time between two consecutive shifts in all roundtrips. In order to solve the scheduling model, in this paper a serial-parallel ant colony optimization algorithm (SP-ACO) is provided. The SP-ACO proposed two improvements: (1) a serial-parallel ant grouping strategy, it means that we let every group of ants find the solution one group by one group for reflecting the positive feedback in a generation; (2) the transition method based on the roulette wheel selection, it means that we randomly select between the certain search and the roulette wheel to make the diversity of solutions for avoiding all ants toward the same part of the search space. Finally, two application cases of the scheduling model are represented. The two cases results show that the methods can not only automatically set roundtrips, but also decrease the number of roundtrips, and the results also show that the feasibility of model and the validity of improved ant colony algorithm for crew scheduling.