Rail Crew Scheduling Based on a Pooling Mode for High Speed Passenger Lines

Rail high-speed passenger lines (HSPL) have been developed rapidly in China; however, the traditional rail crew scheduling mode called responsible mode, in which crews are bundled with vehicles, is hard to adapt to the transit characteristic of HSPL. Moreover, the utilization of rail crew resources is commonly inefficient and the scheduling methods are generally behindhand. To reduce the pressure of high cost and lacking qualified crew in HSPL, a pooling crew scheduling mode should be applied and would be a trend, which can help rail agencies increase the utilization of crew resources and managerial levels. Under the pooling mode, the crew scheduling problem becomes much more complicated, known to be NP-hard. A set covering model is applied, in which the variables represent precompiled potential shifts and each shift must conform to a set of labor agreement rules. The model is solved by ILOG - an advanced optimization tool and tested with a real-world problem instance, which is abstracted from Guangzhou-Shenzhen high-speed line. The computational results show that the model and method are effective and efficient.