Railway Crew Scheduling Using Heuristic Model

This paper aims to solve railway crew scheduling problem that is concerned with building the work schedules of crews needed to cover a planned timetable. The proposed model is a two-phase procedure. For the first phase, the pairing generation, a depth first search approach is employed to generate a set of round trips starting and ending at home base. The second phase deals with the selection of a subset of the generated pairings with minimal cost, covering all trips that have to carry out during a predefined time period. This problem, which is modeled by set covering formulation, is solved with a genetic algorithm. In order to check for quality and validity of the suggested method, we compare its results with the final solutions that are produced over the 6 test problems of Beasley and Cao (1996). Comparison of the results indicates good quality and solutions.