Scheduling for extraboard operations in transit systems

High levels of absenteeism and uncertainty about the amount of work to be performed force transit agencies to employ more operators than needed to ensure delivery of scheduled service reliably. The efficient utilization of these extra operators (extraboard) is very important and has two aspects: a) the determination of the daily number of extraboard operators (both full time and part time) needed and b) the assignment of report times to these extraboard operators. Models are presented which take into account the operating characteristics of transit systems and result in ‘optimal’ utilization of available resources. A case study demonstrates that the results obtained by using these models are superior to the rules of thumb widely used by the industry, or to simple deterministic models.