MISTA 2009 Conference Program Committee

MISTA 2009
Case studies of successful train crew scheduling optimization
Raymond S K Kwan
Abstract UK has a large and complex passenger rail network divided into a number of franchises. Crew
scheduling, one of the last stages of operations planning before services go live, is mission critical to the train
operating companies, which would feel the pain of manual scheduling. As far as the author is aware, attempts by
these companies to adopt an automatic optimizing train crew scheduling system were unsuccessful except with
TrainTRACS. After the first adoption of TrainTRACS by ScotRail in 2003, the author has founded the
University of Leeds spin-out company Tracsis to commercialise TrainTRACS fully and to expand to other
operations planning functions. Since then, TrainTRACS has gained wide acceptance by the UK rail industry.
This paper discusses the major factors behind the achievements of TrainTRACS drawing from practical
experience of development and interaction with the industry over many years. A couple of selected case studies
will be presented in the discussion.
1. Introduction
Multidisciplinary International Conference on Scheduling : Theory and Applications (MISTA 2009)
10-12 August 2009, Dublin, Ireland
In UK resource scheduling in advance of a new set of train timetables, usually for the next six months, is called
‘long term planning’ (LTP). In contrast, ‘short term planning’ (STP) deals with temporary network disruptions
such as those caused by engineering work and timetable changes for public events such as football matches. This
paper concerns mainly LTP train crew scheduling.
LTP train crew scheduling produces crew shifts on a daily basis. Across the week, individual crew
members would need rest days and may have to attend training events. Furthermore provisions for sickness,
annual leaves and spare coverage all add to the total work force. Therefore the actual number of crew members
employed is a multiple of the maximum number of shifts on any day of the week. For example, for train drivers
this multiplier is about 2.0. Total train crew cost also has to account for several categories of crews such as
guards, conductors, and catering staff. Rail transport incurs substantial operating costs in network infrastructure,
rolling stocks, energy and train crews. In UK, train crews account for about 20 – 25% of the total operating cost.
A small percentage reduction of LTP daily shifts would translate into multi-million Pounds annual savings.
Train operators would also be motivated to seek the most efficient crew schedules so as to afford ploughing
back some slacks into the schedules for robustness against crews being caught up by delays. Moreover,
competitive tendering of the operating franchises in the privatised UK rail industry has forced the train
companies to be ever more conscious of optimizing their operations – even before a franchise has been won.
Under this backdrop of motivation to optimize, train companies are under immense pressure to automate
train crew scheduling. It is one of the last stages of resource planning after timetables planning and rolling stock
scheduling. As it cannot start until the preceding processes have been completed and the timetables and rolling
stock schedules have been frozen, planners are usually pressurized by very tight deadlines for the production of
crew schedules before the operation goes live. Automation would speed up schedule production freeing up
valuable time for the planners to think strategically and to explore a fuller range of what-ifs.
For the above reasons, train operating companies (TOC) would very much want to use automatic
optimizing train crew scheduling systems. Indeed, there has been major piloting use of such software systems in
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