Integrating crew scheduling and crew rostering for rail freight with train delays

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  • 8 January 2026
    • preprint
    • Published by HAL in HAL
Abstract
Crew scheduling and crew rostering are two key stages in the design of yearly plannings for train drivers. These stages are usually handled sequentially, which may lead to suboptimal solutions. In this work, we address the two stages in an integrated manner for an application to rail freight at the SNCF, the main French railway operator, and propose a method based on column generation that solves both stages simultaneously, while taking into account all the eighteen working rules. We demonstrate the practical relevance of our approach on real freight instances from the SNCF, by displaying substantial cost reductions.Integrating the two stages also makes it possible to better account for uncertainty. We introduce a simple metric to measure the ``fragility'' of rosters with respect to train delays, and we incorporate a stochastic constraint based on this metric into the integrated formulation. Our approach successfully handles this constraint, and experiments on real instances show that the resilience to delays can be improved while maintaining costs at least as good as those obtained with the standard sequential approach in the deterministic setting.
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