Tabu Search for Bus Crew Scheduling with Feasible Sets of Shifts

Abstract

Public transit crew scheduling problem is to carry out the operations task with the minimum drivers and operational cost. It is a multi-objective programming problem, which is well-known to be NP-hard. Restrained by the operational constraints and labor agreement, all the feasible sets of shifts were pre-generated in this paper. This work established a penalty function to ensure the validity of the schedule, and a cost function to reduce costs. With the help of Tabu Search, a solution can be found easily. A computational experiment based on the real-world crew scheduling problem in China demonstrates the strength of this method.