This chapter deals with railway crew management, thereby focusing on the situation at Netherlands Railways (NS). NS is the main operator of passenger trains in the Netherlands. In this context, railway crew management is the process of... more
This chapter deals with railway crew management, thereby focusing on the situation at Netherlands Railways (NS). NS is the main operator of passenger trains in the Netherlands. In this context, railway crew management is the process of guaranteeing in the most efficient way that the timetabled trains are supplied with a train driver and a sufficient number of conductors, thereby satisfying all the relevant practical constraints. Crew management has long term capacity planning aspects as well as short term scheduling, rostering, and dispatching aspects. In this chapter we describe these planning and dispatching processes, thereby focusing on practical issues. We also describe the planning support tools that are used by NS to support these processes.
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Passenger Trains. (CentER Discussion Paper; Vol. 2002-43). Tilburg: Operations research. General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other... more
Passenger Trains. (CentER Discussion Paper; Vol. 2002-43). Tilburg: Operations research. General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.? Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research? You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain? You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright, please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 12. mei. 2016 No. 2002-43
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In December 2006, Netherlands Railways introduced a completely new timetable. Its objective was to facilitate the growth of passenger and freight transport on a highly utilized railway network, and improve the robustness of the timetable... more
In December 2006, Netherlands Railways introduced a completely new timetable. Its objective was to facilitate the growth of passenger and freight transport on a highly utilized railway network, and improve the robustness of the timetable resulting in less train delays in the operation. Further adjusting the existing timetable constructed in 1970 was not option anymore, because further growth would then require significant investments in the rail infrastructure. Constructing a railway timetable from scratch for about 5,500 daily trains was a complex problem. To support this process, we generated several timetables using sophisticated operations research techniques, and finally selected and implemented one of these timetables. Furthermore, because rolling-stock and crew costs are principal components of the cost of a passenger railway operator, we used innovative operations research tools to devise efficient schedules for these two resources.
Research Interests: Information Systems, Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, Operations Research, and 11 morePrincipal Component Analysis, Scheduling, Transportation, Programming, Business and Management, Profitability, Interfaces, Greenhouse gases, Freight Transport, Resource Scheduling, and transport system
This paper deals with large-scale crew scheduling problems arising at the Dutch railway operator, Netherlands Railways (NS). NS oper-ates about 30,000 trains a week. All these trains need a driver and a certain number of conductors. No... more
This paper deals with large-scale crew scheduling problems arising at the Dutch railway operator, Netherlands Railways (NS). NS oper-ates about 30,000 trains a week. All these trains need a driver and a certain number of conductors. No available crew scheduling algorithm can solve such huge instances at once. A common approach to deal with these huge weekly instances, is to split them into several daily instances and solve those separately. However, we found out that this can be rather inefficient. In this paper, we discuss several methods to partition huge in-stances into several smaller ones. These smaller instances are then solved with the commercially available crew scheduling algorithm TURNI. We compare these partitioning methods with each other, and we re-port several results where we applied different partitioning methods after each other. The results show that all methods significantly im-prove the solution. With the best approach, we were able to cut down crew costs with ab...
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This demonstration presents recent developments in the MAS@NS project: a collaboration between Netherlands Railways and the D-CIS Lab to explore the effectiveness and suitability of a decentralized multi-agent approach to crew... more
This demonstration presents recent developments in the MAS@NS project: a collaboration between Netherlands Railways and the D-CIS Lab to explore the effectiveness and suitability of a decentralized multi-agent approach to crew rescheduling. The project (launched in 2007) was reported on earlier at BNAIC’08 [1] and other conferences ([2], [3]). These publications describe the problem domain and present the rationale behind the MAS-based approach as well as details concerning the architecture and performance results. The project has resulted in a full scale prototype at the end of 2008, which is capable of solving large disruptions based on actual timetable and driver duty data. This demonstration focuses on recent advances in the ongoing pursuit of the goal of evaluating the system in an operational setting.
This paper describes the design of a socio-technical research system for the purpose of rescheduling train drivers in the event of disruptions. The research system is structured according to the Actor-Agent paradigm: Here agents assist in... more
This paper describes the design of a socio-technical research system for the purpose of rescheduling train drivers in the event of disruptions. The research system is structured according to the Actor-Agent paradigm: Here agents assist in rescheduling tasks of train drivers. Coordination between agents is based on a team formation process in which possible rescheduling alternatives can be evaluated, based on constraints and preferences of involved human train drivers and dispatchers. The research aim is to explore the effectiveness of a decentralized, flexible actor-agent based approach to crew rescheduling. The research system is realized using the Cougaar framework and includes actual rolling stock schedule data and driver duty data. The current reduced-scale version shows promising results for the full-scale version end 2008. 1 Netherlands Railways: Planning and Rescheduling Applied research on advanced autonomous systems in a real-world domain provides a stimulating environment ...
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This book promotes the use of mathematical optimization and operations research methods in rail transportation. The editors assembled thirteen contributions from leading scholars to present a unified voice, standardize terminology, and... more
This book promotes the use of mathematical optimization and operations research methods in rail transportation. The editors assembled thirteen contributions from leading scholars to present a unified voice, standardize terminology, and assess the state-of-the-art. There are three main clusters of articles, corresponding to the classical stages of the planning process: strategic, tactical, and operational. These three clusters are further subdivided into five parts which correspond to the main phases of the railway network planning process: network assessment, capacity planning, timetabling, resource planning, and operational planning. Individual chapters cover: Simulation Capacity Assessment Network Design Train Routing Robust Timetabling Event Scheduling Track Allocation Blocking Shunting Rolling Stock Crew Scheduling Dispatching Delay Propagation
Research Interests: Information Systems, Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, Operations Research, and 13 morePrincipal Component Analysis, Scheduling, Transportation, Intelligent Transport System, Programming, Business and Management, Profitability, Interfaces, Greenhouse gases, Freight Transport, Principal component analysis (PCA), Resource Scheduling, and transport system
textabstract__Abstract__ Crew management in passenger rail transport is an important factor that contributes to both the quality of service to the railway passengers and to the operational costs of the train operating company. This thesis... more
textabstract__Abstract__ Crew management in passenger rail transport is an important factor that contributes to both the quality of service to the railway passengers and to the operational costs of the train operating company. This thesis describes how the (railway) Crew Management process can be improved with the introduction of advanced decision support systems, based on advanced mathematical models and algorithms. We provide a managerial perspective on the change process, related to the introduction of these systems, and give an overview of the lessons learned. We have shown that introducing decision support can give substantial improvements in the overall performance of a railway company. Within NS, the support for the Crew Management process has led to a stable relationship between management and train crew. In addition, the lead-time of the planning process is shortened from months to hours and NS is now able to perform scenario analyses, e.g., to study effects of adjusting th...
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ABSTRACT In this chapter we will describe our approach to the problem described in chapter 12. In our approach, we use Constraint Satisfaction Programming (CSP), which is a technique that uses domain reduction and constraint propagation... more
ABSTRACT In this chapter we will describe our approach to the problem described in chapter 12. In our approach, we use Constraint Satisfaction Programming (CSP), which is a technique that uses domain reduction and constraint propagation to solve the shunting planning problem.
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KNAW Narcis. Back to search results. Publication Passengers Steering Trains : A Multi-Actor Approach for... (2009) Open access. Pagina-navigatie: Main. Title, Passengers Steering Trains : A Multi-Actor Approach for Operations and Control... more
KNAW Narcis. Back to search results. Publication Passengers Steering Trains : A Multi-Actor Approach for... (2009) Open access. Pagina-navigatie: Main. Title, Passengers Steering Trains : A Multi-Actor Approach for Operations and Control in the Netherlands Railways. ...
Page 1. Solving Large Scale Crew Scheduling Problems by using Iterative Partitioning Erwin Abbink1, Joël van 't Wout1 and Dennis Huisman1,2 1 Department of Logistics, Netherlands Railways (NS), PO Box 2025, NL-3500 ...
This paper describes a method for solving the cyclic crewrostering problem (CCRP). This is the problem of cyclicallyordering a set of duties for a number of crew members, such thatseveral complex constraints are satisfied and such that... more
This paper describes a method for solving the cyclic crewrostering problem (CCRP). This is the problem of cyclicallyordering a set of duties for a number of crew members, such thatseveral complex constraints are satisfied and such that thequality of the obtained roster is as high as possible. Thedescribed method was tested on a number of instances of NS, thelargest operator
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This paper deals with large-scale crew scheduling problems arising at the main Dutch railway operator, Netherlands Railways (NS). NS operates about 30000 trains a week. All these trains need a driver and a certain number of guards. Some... more
This paper deals with large-scale crew scheduling problems arising at the main Dutch railway operator, Netherlands Railways (NS). NS operates about 30000 trains a week. All these trains need a driver and a certain number of guards. Some labor rules restrict the duties of a certain crew base over the complete week. Therefore, splitting the problem in several subproblems per
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For a commercially operating railway company, providing a high level of service for the passengers is of utmost importance. The latter requires a high punctuality of the trains and an adequate rolling stock capacity. Unfortunately, the... more
For a commercially operating railway company, providing a high level of service for the passengers is of utmost importance. The latter requires a high punctuality of the trains and an adequate rolling stock capacity. Unfortunately, the latter is currently (2002) one of the bottlenecks in the service provision by the main Dutch railway operator NS Reizigers. Especially during the morning