TWO APPROACHES TO VEHICLE AND CREW SCHEDULING IN URBAN AND REGIONAL BUS TRANSPORT

There are two different approaches to vehicle and crew scheduling in urban and regional bus transport. In Slovak and Czech Republic simultaneous bus and crew scheduling is used. This approach supposes that drivers cannot change vehicles and hence all constraints required for drivers working time have to be imposed to running boards of vehicles. Constraints and conditions for such running boards can be formulated as nonlinear objective functions and the resulting task is a nonlinear multi criteria optimization problem. A good suboptimal algorithm was developed for this problem. In Great Britain (and many other countries) a two stage scheduling procedure is used. In the first step an optimum vehicle schedule is calculated. In the second one a large set of possible driver shifts is created and then an optimum subset is selected using set covering problem. The comparison of two mentioned approaches shows that the second approach can save dead mileage and total driver working time.