This paper presents an exact approach for solving the simultaneous vehicle and crew scheduling problem in urban mass transit systems. We consider the single depot case with a homogeneous fleet of vehicles. This approach relies on a set partitioning formulation for the driver scheduling problem that incorporates side constraints for the bus itineraries. The proposed solution approach consists of a column generation process (only for the crew schedules) integrated into a branch-and-bound scheme. The side constraints on buses guarantee that an optimal vehicle assignment can be derived afterwards in polynomial time. A computational study shows that this approach out-performs the previous methods found in the literature for a set of randomly generated instances. A heuristic version of the solution approach is also proposed and tested on larger instances.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.