A case study of Beijing bus crew scheduling: a variable neighborhood‐based approach |
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| Authors: | Jihui Ma Avishai Ceder Yang Yang Tao Liu Wei Guan |
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| Institution: | 1. MOE Key Laboratory for Urban Transportation Complex Systems Theory and Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, China;2. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand;3. Technion‐Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel |
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| Abstract: | Crew scheduling for bus drivers in large bus agencies is known to be a time‐consuming and cumbersome problem in transit operations planning. This paper investigates a new meta‐heuristics approach for solving real‐world bus‐driver scheduling problems. The drivers' work is represented as a series of successive pieces of work with time windows, and a variable neighborhood search (VNS) algorithm is employed to solve the problem of driver scheduling. Examination of the modeling procedure developed is performed by a case study of two depots of the Beijing Public Transport Group, one of the largest transit companies in the world. The results show that a VNS‐based algorithm can reduce total driver costs by up to 18.1%, implying that the VNS algorithm may be regarded as a good optimization technique to solve the bus‐driver scheduling problem. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
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| Keywords: | crew scheduling problem variable neighborhood search local search meta‐heuristic |
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