Crew Planning at Netherlands Railways: Improving Fairness, Attractiveness, and Efficiency

Railway transportation and mass transit play a vital role in modern-day society. As a result, they have a major impact on everyday life: The societal costs of disturbances, such as delayed or cancelled trips, and strikes of personnel can be as large as hundreds of millions of euros.  In both cases, crew planning plays an important role. In the case of disturbances, for example, the re-planning of crew is a crucial part of an efficient response, whereas strikes can be avoided by incorporating the demands of the employees in the crew planning process.

In recent years, Netherlands Railways, the largest passenger railway operator in the Netherlands, has successfully developed high-quality decision support and improved their crew planning process. In this thesis, we take the next step: We consider novel optimization problems that aim at improving and/or integrating important parts of the crew planning process. In doing so, we focus on the efficiency, fairness, and attractiveness of the crew schedule. For each of the introduced problems, we develop suitable solution approaches and analytical results and validate our methods using real-world data from NS.