Passenger railway crew scheduling

Starting point of this thesis is the well-known and by now classical Operations Research (OR) problem of scheduling a set of crews (located at several crew bases) to perform a set of transport tasks satisfying a variety of constraints at minimal cost. The problem is known as the crew scheduling problem (CSP), and it occurs frequently in the real world, for instance in the airline industry, at passenger and freight railways, and at mass-transit operators. In this thesis, the specific CSP arising at the long-distance passenger railway unit of Germany’s Deutsche Bahn AG (DB) is studied. Seen in a broader context, the CSP is one of the main decision problems in crew management, which deals with strategic issues related to the midterm and/or long-term demand for crews. Crew management has the primary goal to establish a long-term match between the required and the available number of crews (see Huisman et al., 2005). Furthermore, the location of the crew bases in the railway network has to be decided on, and their respective staffing levels have to be forecasted several years in advance.