Integrated and Dynamic Vehicle and Crew Scheduling

Dennis Huisman geboren te Dordrecht. Acknowledgements Thinking back on the last four-and-a-half years, immediately Richard Freling comes in my mind. I met him about five years ago for the first time, when I started to write my master thesis, which was an extension of Richard's research on integrated vehicle and crew scheduling. Later on, after I became a PhD student, we had a lot of discussions about our joint research, but also about life in general. For me, it was therefore a shock to hear that he was seriously ill. After a fight of five months, he passed away in January 2002. However, he is still and will always be in my mind as an extremely kind and helpful person. At this place, I would therefore like to thank him for his support, since without him this thesis would never have been written! Furthermore, I would like to thank my promotors Albert Wagelmans and Rommert Dekker. Albert, I met you for the first time, which you probably do not remember any-more, at an information day on Econometrics in March 1995. Later on, you were my teacher in Combinatorial Optimization, where my interest in this area was raised. After-wards, we had some talks about following several PhD-courses and becoming a student assistant. After a successful collaboration, I decided to start a PhD under your (and Richard's) supervision. During these four-and-a-half years we had a lot of interesting discussions about the research and you gave a lot of valuable comments, which significantly improved the papers we wrote and this thesis as well. Moreover, we always had a good personal relation, which in my opinion is at least as important as a good professional relation. Rommert, we always had a lot of discussion during lunch time about the field of Operations Research, money and other issues related to science in general. I always enjoyed these discussions. Some valuable comments to improve this thesis were given by Leo Kroon. I appreciate it very much that you read an earlier draft of this thesis very carefully and gave some helpful suggestions. Furthermore, I would like to thank all other members of the PhD committee: Guy Desaulniers, Steef van de Velde, Raymond Kwan and Hans Frenk. Moreover, I would like to thank Guy and Raymond for their time to be here during the defense and for the talk they gave at the workshop prior to this …