Staff rostering for the station personnel of a railway company

Abstract

This paper presents a case study commissioned by the Spanish railway carrier Ferrocariles Españoles de Vía Estrecha for the annual rostering of work schedules for station personnel. A mixed rostering process is used. The first part of the process is carried out manually with the aid of a spreadsheet and Visual Basic, and consists of designing an initial graphic with 4-week patterns for each station, assigning those patterns in a rotating schedule over the year and factoring in vacation time. The second part consists of assigning relief shifts to cover those shifts left vacant in such a way as to minimize the distance travelled by personnel from other stations brought in for relief shift duty. To that end, basic programmes are designed using binary programming and a 4-week time frame. The results obtained are a clear improvement on the system previously used at FEVE and the company has decided to implement the model.

Keywords:

• manpower planning
• crew rostering
• scheduling
• binary programming

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank José Luis Suárez Machargo, José Francisco Miranda and Felipe Díaz Palacios of FEVE for their assistance in preparing this paper. The work was funded by FEVE and managed by Fundación Euskoiker.