Tactical crew planning in railways

Tactical crew capacity planning problem in railways involves finding the minimum number of crews in a region required to operate a predetermined set of train duties satisfying the strict day‐off requirement for crew. For the single‐region problem, we develop two solution approaches based on a space–time network representation: the sequential approach and the integrated approach. We also study the multi‐regional capacity planning problem where we minimize total system‐wide capacity by simultaneously considering multiple regions within a neighborhood search algorithm based on our solution methods for the single‐region problem. We present the computational study on problem instances from Turkish State Railways.