A travelling salesman model for the sequencing of duties in bus crew rotas

The paper addresses one aspect of the rostering problem posed to the public transport company operating in Porto, Portugal. The specific problem dealt with in this paper is that of sequencing the duties within each rota (rotating schedule) so as to minimize the variance of the rest periods between successive duties while satisfying constraints on their minimum value. This problem is formulated as a travelling salesman problem. Solutions derived from two heuristics are compared with the optimal ones.