Tactical crew planning in railways

Tactical crew capacity planning problem in railways involves finding the minimum number of crews in a region required to operate a predetermined set of train duties satisfying the strict day-off requirement for crew. For the single-region problem, we develop two solution approaches based on a space-time network representation: the sequential approach and the integrated approach. We also study the multi-regional capacity planning problem where we minimize total system-wide capacity by simultaneously considering multiple regions within a neighborhood search algorithm based on our solution methods for the single-region problem. We present the computational study on problem instances from Turkish State Railways. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.