Branching strategies to improve regularity of crew schedules in ex-urban public transit

We discuss timetables in ex-urban bus traffic that consist of many trips serviced every day together with some exceptions that do not repeat daily. Traditional optimization methods for vehicle and crew scheduling in such cases usually produce schedules that contain irregularities which are not desirable especially from the point of view of the bus drivers. We propose a solution method which improves regularity while partially integrating the vehicle and crew scheduling problems. The approach includes two phases: first we solve the LP relaxation of a set covering formulation, using column generation together with Lagrangean relaxation techniques. In a second phase, we generate integer solutions using a new combination of local branching and various versions of follow-on branching. Numerical tests with artificial and real instances show that regularity can be improved significantly with no or just a minor increase of costs.