Hybrid Column Generation Approaches for Urban Transit Crew Management Problems

This article considers the overall crew management problem arising from the daily operation of an urban transit bus company that serves the metropolitan area of the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Due to its intrinsic complexity, the problem is divided in two distinct subproblems: crew scheduling an...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Transportation science Vol. 39; no. 2; pp. 273 - 288
Main Authors: Yunes, Tallys H, Moura, Arnaldo V, de Souza, Cid C
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Linthicum, MD INFORMS 01.05.2005
Transportation Science Section of the Operations Research Society of America
Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences
Subjects:
Algorithms
Applied sciences
column generation
Companies
Computers
constraint programming
Cost control
crew scheduling
Datasets
Exact sciences and technology
Experiments
Generation conflicts
Ground, air and sea transportation, marine construction
Heuristics
hybrid algorithms
Input data
Integer programming
Integers
Logic programming
Mathematical models
Mathematical programming
Matrices
Objective functions
Optimal solutions
Organizational research
Performance evaluation
Personnel management
Programming
Public services
Public transportation
Road transportation and traffic
Rostering
Scheduling
Studies
Transport
Transport planning
Transportation
Transportation industry
Transportation planning, management and economics
Urban areas
Work groups
Workdays
Workforce planning
South America
Brazil
America
United Kingdom
Belo Horizonte Brazil
Bus
Crew
Columns
column generation
Scheduling
Algorithm
Implementation
Public transportation
Passenger transportation
Urban transportation
crew scheduling
Traffic management
Problem solving
Constraint logic programming
hybrid algorithms
constraint programming
Mathematical programming
ISSN:0041-1655, 1526-5447
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:This article considers the overall crew management problem arising from the daily operation of an urban transit bus company that serves the metropolitan area of the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Due to its intrinsic complexity, the problem is divided in two distinct subproblems: crew scheduling and crew rostering . We have investigated each of these problems using mathematical programming (MP) and constraint logic programming (CLP) approaches. In addition, we developed hybrid column generation algorithms for solving these problems, combining MP and CLP. The hybrid algorithms always performed better, when obtaining optimal solutions, than the two previous isolated approaches. In particular, they proved to be much faster for the scheduling problem. All the proposed algorithms have been implemented and tested over real-world data obtained from the aforementioned company. The coefficient matrix of the linear program associated with some instances of the scheduling problem contains tens of millions of columns; this number is even larger for the rostering problem. The analysis of our experiments indicates that it was possible to find high-quality, and many times optimal, solutions that were suitable for the company’s needs. These solutions were obtained within reasonable computational times on a desktop PC.
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ISSN:0041-1655
1526-5447
DOI:10.1287/trsc.1030.0078