A Decomposition Approach for the Integrated Vehicle-Crew-roster Problem with Days-off Pattern

The integrated vehicle-crew-roster problem with days-off pattern aims to simultaneously determine minimum cost sets of vehicle and daily crew schedules that cover all timetabled trips and a minimum cost roster covering all daily crew duties according to a pre-defined days-off pattern. This problem is modeled as a mixed binary linear programming problem. A heuristic approach with embedded column generation and branch-and-bound techniques within a Benders decomposition is proposed. The new methodology was tested on real instances and the computational results are promising.