Solution of large-scale railway crew planning problems: the Italian experience

Crew scheduling is a very well known problem which has been historically associated with airlines and mass transit companies; recently railway applications have also come on the scene. This is especially true in Europe, where deregulation and privatization edicts are forcing a re-organization of the rail industry and better productivity and more efficient services are strongly required by the market and the public. Therefore, this sector is showing increasing interest in Operations Research and Management Science. Railway crew planning represents a hard problem due to both the dimensions and the operational/regulation constraints involved. This paper describes the development of a new crew planning system set up by Ferrovie dello State SpA (the Italian railway company) in co-operation with the University of Bologna.