The Trip Scheduling Problem

The hours of service regulations of the department of transportation severely restrict the set of feasible driver schedules. So much so that establishing whether a sequence of full truckload transportation requests, each with a dispatch window at the origin, can feasibly be executed by a driver is no longer a matter of simple forward simulation. We consider this problem and prove that the feasibility of a driver schedule can be checked in polynomial time by providing an O(n) algorithm for establishing whether a sequence of full truckload transportation requests, each with a dispatch window at the origin, can be executed by a driver.