Scheduling and managing crew in the Portuguese railways

摘要

We present a tool to generate applications in crew scheduling. The first application developed with this tool, called “ESCALAS”, schedules crews for the Portuguese Railways (it schedules both driving and other crew). This application is complete and installed in the Portuguese Railways. The application is presently undergoing extensive testing and has proved to produce schedules that are comparable with those produced by human experts, at a fraction of time. The system is planned to enter routine operation in May 1992. The system uses a graphic, highly intuitive interface, and enables four different modes of operation: (1) Manual operation, in which the user makes the decisions in building the schedule and the system automatically verifies all the constraints and labour rules imposed upon it; (2) Semiautomatic operation, in which the system gives hints about hoe the user should pursue the schedule; (3) Fully automatic operation, in which thesystem automatically builds a schedule, according to a predefined set of scheduling strategies; (4) Mixed mode, in which there is an interaction with the user who may impose certain restrictions or combinations of tasks, the systems partially builds a schedule which can then be modified by the user and the automatic generation may proceed with the restrictions imposed. Besides, the system is able to perform crew assignment to each one of the schedules produced and can modify both the schedule and the assignment produced.