Transit crew scheduling on a personal workstation (MS/DOS)

The paper presents a computerized procedure for scheduling bus drivers in mass transport systems. The procedure is based on mathematical programming methods for crew scheduling and it has been implemented on a personal computer. The particular structure of the bus crew scheduling problems is exploited in order to consider a sequence of set covering instances. Each one of them can be optimally solved by an algorithm involving the use of several techniques and running under the CPU limit of 640KB. The procedure has been used at two of the largest transport operators in Portugal, Rodoviária Nacional and CARRIS (Lisbon), where some significant saving have been achieved relative to previous solutions automatically generated too.