ECOPT intends to organize several small workshops with both a scientific speaker and a speaker from practice throughout the year. The next workshop takes place on Tuesday, February 26, 2019, at the Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Speakers and program

The speakers in this workshop are:

• Ricardo Saldanha (Siscog, Portugal)
• Thomas Breugem (Erasmus University Rotterdam)

The program is as follows.

Abstracts

Ricardo Saldanha: Profit-based Optimisation of Rolling Stock Rotations: a case study from North America

The optimisation of rolling stock rotations or circulations is usually regarded in the literature as a cost minimization problem with the passenger demand being modelled as a hard or soft constraint. Although minimising operational and financial costs (e.g. maintenance, energy consumption, renting or purchasing costs) is of paramount importance, increasing revenue should not be disregarded. 

We present a case study from a North American intercity train operator that provides passenger transportation through a seat reservation system. By using FLEET (a decision-support system developed by SISCOG), and in particular its optimisers, it is possible to increase revenue and decrease costs by producing rolling stock rotations that adjust seat capacity to passenger demand in a smarter way.

In this talk we will provide insights about the solution method used and the results obtained in practice.

Thomas Breugem: Is Equality always desirable? Analyzing the Trade-Off between Fairness and Attractiveness in Crew Rostering

The planning of personnel is one of the most challenging planning problems for a public transport operator. This is partly due to the large-scale nature of the problem, but also due to the two conflicting objectives: minimizing cost from an operational point of view, and maximizing the quality of work from an employee's point of view. It is clear that incorporating the demands of employees in the planning process is  crucial for a public transport operator's operational efficiency. 

In this talk, we focus on crew rostering (i.e., assigning the duties to the employees), which is an important part of the crew planning process.  Unlike other operational problems, such as rolling stock scheduling, crew rostering does not focus on operational costs. Instead, the rosters are evaluated based on perceived fairness and perceived attractiveness.  We introduce the Fairness-oriented Crew Rostering Problem (FCRP), which considers the explicit trade-off between fairness and attractiveness, and  develop an exact Branch-Price-and-Cut solution method for this problem. Furthermore, we propose a  heuristic method to tackle the large-scale instances encountered in practice. We conclude with a case study at Netherlands Railways, in which we show the benefits of our framework.

Venue: EUR campus Woudestein, Polak Building Y2-04. Directions on how to get to the campus and a map of the campus can be found here. 

Registration: Participation in the workshop is free. However, only a limited number of places are available. Therefore, we ask you to register for the workshop by sending an email to dollevoet@ese.eur.nl. Registrations will be served on a first-come-first-serve basis.