Copyright © 2012 Mingming Chen and Huimin Niu. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper presents an approach for solving the bus crew scheduling problem which considers early, day, and late duty modes with time shift and work intensity constraints. Furthermore, the constraint with the least crew number of a certain duty (e.g., day duty) has also been considered. An optimization model is formulated as a 0-1 integer programming problem to improve the efficiency of crew scheduling at the minimum expense of total idle time of crew for a circle bus line. Correspondingly, a heuristic algorithm utilizing the tabu search algorithm has been proposed to solve the model. Finally, the proposed model and algorithm are successfully tested by a case study.