Railway crew rescheduling with retiming

Authors

Lucas P. Veelenturf
Daniel Potthoff
Dennis Huisman
Leo G. Kroon

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

2010

Subject Area

mode - rail, place - north america, infrastructure - rolling stock, operations - scheduling, organisation - workforce planning

Keywords

Railways, Crew rescheduling, Retiming, Column generation

Abstract

Railway operations are disrupted frequently. For example, the Dutch railway network experiences about three large disruptions per day on average. In a disrupted situation, a railway operator needs to quickly adjust the timetable and the resource schedules. Usually the timetable, the rolling stock and the crew schedule are recovered in a sequential way. In this paper, we model and solve the crew rescheduling problem with retiming. This problem extends the crew rescheduling problem by the possibility to slightly delay the departure of some trains, so that some more flexibility in the crew scheduling process is obtained. Our algorithm focuses on rescheduling the duties of the train drivers. It is based on column generation techniques combined with Lagrangian heuristics. In order to prevent a large increase in computation time, retiming is allowed only for a limited number of trains for which it seems promising. Computational experiments with train driver duties and real-life disruption data show that, compared to the classical approach, it is possible to find better solutions by using crew rescheduling with retiming.

Rights

Permission to publish the abstract has been given by Elsevier, copyright remains with them.

Comments

Transportation Research Part C Home Page: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/0968090X

Recommended Citation

Veelenturf, L.P., Potthoff, D., Huisman, D., & Kroon, L.G. (2010). Railway crew rescheduling with retiming. Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, Article In Press, Corrected Proof.