An efficient solution approach for real‐world driver scheduling problems in urban bus transportation

The driver scheduling problem in public transportation is defined in the following way. There is a set of operational tasks, and the goal is to define the sequence of these tasks as shifts in such a way that every task must be assigned to a shift without overlapping. In real‐world situations several additional constraints need to be considered, which makes large practical problems challenging to be solved efficiently. In practice it is also an important request with respect to a public transportation scheduling system to offer several versions of quasi‐optimal solutions. In this paper we present an efficient driver scheduling solution methodology which is flexible in the above sense.