Railway Crew Management

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Handbook of Optimization in the Railway Industry

Abstract

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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Notes

  1. 1.

    In order to simplify the formulations in this chapter, we assume that the crew members are male, despite the fact that the number of women among the crew members is increasing. However, they are still a minority.

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Abbink, E., Huisman, D., Kroon, L. (2018). Railway Crew Management. In: Borndörfer, R., Klug, T., Lamorgese, L., Mannino, C., Reuther, M., Schlechte, T. (eds) Handbook of Optimization in the Railway Industry. International Series in Operations Research & Management Science, vol 268. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72153-8_11

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