Vehicle scheduling for suburban public transport

This paper studies the Vehicle Scheduling Problem (VSP) in the context of suburban passenger transportation. The problem consists in finding a set of sequences of trips which have to be assigned to the available fleet of buses. The complexity of this problem depends on the number of depots where the fleet is housed. The paper focuses on the resolution of Multiple Depot VSP (MDVSP) which has NP-Hard Complexity. A column generation heuristic is proposed to solve the problem, and two heuristic algorithms are used to provide a set of initial columns, one of them is based on the auction algorithm for Single Depot VSP (SDVSP). The algorithms where tested with a small instance and real world one, obtaining solutions which are either optimal or have lower cost and use less buses than the best known solution for a related and more complex problem.