Scheduling train crews: a case study for the Dutch Railways

In this paper the problem of scheduling train crew is considered. We discuss a general framework of which the method for solving the train crew scheduling problem is a special case. In particular, our method is a heuristic branch-and-price algorithm suitable for large scale crew scheduling problems. This algorithm is applied to a real life train guard scheduling problem which is provided to us by the Dutch Railways. Computational results show that our algorithm is capable of getting sub-optimal solutions for a large scale instance within reasonable computation time.