Strategic Planning of Depots for a Railway Crew Scheduling Problem

This paper presents a strategic depot planning approach for a railway crew scheduling problem integrated in a column generation framework. Since the integration strongly weakens the relaxation of the master problem we consider different variants for strengthening the formulation. In addition, the problem can be sufficiently simplified by using a standard day at the strategic level. Based on a case study for an exemplary real-life instance, we can show that a proper pre-selection of depots reduces the number of needed depots significantly with the same personnel costs.