An Enumeration-Based Approach for Flexible Railway Crew Rescheduling in Disruption Management

Abstract

Complicated railway networks and high-density train service in common urban areas have led to difficulties in railway operation after incidents. Supporting crew rescheduling task in disruption management is important for realizing reliable services. In crew rescheduling task, flexible responses are required depending on the situation, but with common methods whose objectives and constraints are given, getting an appropriate crew plan in every case is hard. Therefore, we developed a support function by which railway operators can compare multiple feasible crew plans and select one that meets the current situations. To realize this function, we propose a method of constructing a zero-suppressed binary decision diagram (ZDD) that expresses a set of multiple feasible crew plans. We compared the performance of the proposed function with the conventional way in the case of medium-sized railway line and confirmed that our function is suitable for situations in which interactive comparisons are performed.