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Crew Scheduling
Most United States Class I railroads use crew calling software to assign crews to trains in a tactical environment. Existing tactical systems are relatively simple, rule-based information systems that do not recommend deadhead vs. hotel decisions. Determining whether to deadhead or place crew members in a hotel is an important decision that has to be made for each crew working away from home. In addition, railroads do not have sophisticated decision support systems or strategies for crew planning that are directly linked to their tactical systems.
Innovative Crew Scheduling Optimizer (ICSO) is a crew scheduling system with tactical, planning, and strategic applications. ICSO takes, as input, a train schedule and crew size data and generates a crew assignment for each train. It takes into account various cost terms, crew union constraints, and FRA (Federal Railway Administration) regulations, and then generates a crew rotation plan for each crew, including deadhead and hotel stay decisions.
ICSO can handle a variety of crew district configurations found in a typical railroad network in the United States:
single-ended districts,double-ended districts,triangular districts, andshort-long pools,etc.The crew-scheduling engine uses a mixed-integer programming formulation on a time-space network, and can determine a one-week crew assignment for a crew district within a few seconds. We have packaged the optimization engine in ICSO within a web-based decision support system, which includes data review/edit, solution analysis, reports, charts, and maps as standard capabilities.
ICSO is available for demonstration, pilot studies, or licensing.
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Brochure
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