Automatic Generation Method for Crew Scheduling After a Large-scale Natural Disaster

When railway line sections are partially disrupted due to damage from large-scale natural disasters, it is necessary to prepare crew schedule plans for temporary timetables. In such a case, a crew schedule plan ensures that duties once assigned to crew members are not changed. As this task is time-consuming for schedule planners, an automatic crew scheduling method for supporting planners is desired. In this paper, we focus on crew scheduling following a large-scale natural disaster. The proposed algorithm is based on mathematical programming and column generation. In addition, we show the results of computational experiments based on a real disaster case, which indicate that the proposed algorithm can generate an efficient schedule plan in a short time.