Case studies of successful train crew scheduling optimisation

UK has a large and complex passenger rail network divided into a number of franchises. Crew scheduling, one of the last stages of operations planning before services go live, is mission critical to the train operating companies, which would feel the pain of manual scheduling. As far as the author is aware, attempts by these companies to adopt an automatic optimizing train crew scheduling system were unsuccessful except with TrainTRACS. After the first adoption of TrainTRACS by ScotRail in 2003, the author has founded the University of Leeds spin-out company Tracsis to commercialise TrainTRACS fully and to expand to other operations planning functions. Since then, TrainTRACS has gained wide acceptance by the UK rail industry. This paper discusses the major factors behind the achievements of TrainTRACS drawing from practical experience of development and interaction with the industry over many years. A couple of selected case studies will be presented in the discussion.