Rail Crew Re-Scheduling: from Planning towards Operations

In the Dutch railway network, there are a few times per week modifications in the timetable necessary due to unexpected maintenance projects or planned maintenance project that finish later than expected. Moreover, there are about 20 disruptions per day on average. These disruptions can be caused by the infrastructure (e.g. broken switches, no power supply), the weather (e.g. longer braking times due to wet leafs on the track), third parties (e.g. suicides, accidents with other traffic), and the operator itself (e.g. broken rolling stock engines, sickness of crew). In the Dutch situation, the infrastructure manager ProRail is responsible for modifications in the timetable. However, the rolling stock circulation and the crew schedules are the responsibility of the operators. The main Dutch railway operator, NS, changes these schedules in its Operational Control Centers. Currently, there is no decision support at all in these centers. In this research, we develop some algorithms for crew re-scheduling to support their work. Crew scheduling is one of the most successful OR applications in the railway industry (see e.g. Abbink et al. (2005); Fores et al. (2001); Kohl (2003); Kroon & Fischetti (2001) for applications at several railway companies). However, only limited research has been done on crew re-scheduling. In earlier work, Huisman (2005), we developed an approach for the Crew ReScheduling Problem (CRSP) in case of planned maintenance work. As far as we know, this is the only paper that deals with crew re-scheduling in the railway world. In this paper, we will apply this approach for re-scheduling