Designing and modeling the integrated bus and driver scheduling problem

This paper discussed the necessity and advantages of scheduling buses and their drivers simultaneously whilst indicating the limitations of the traditional two-stage sequential scheduling approach on dealing with the closely associated constraints enforced on buses and their drivers. A framework based on the minimum cost network flow was established, in which the nodes, arcs and the costing method were aboratively devised to fit with the integrated bus and driver scheduling problem. Based on the framework, an integer linear programming model was built, which could represent accurately the real-world scheduling problem and lay a foundation for solving the integrated scheduling problem using a variety of optimization tools.